


What the Water Gave

by CyborgShepard



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Accidental Voyeurism, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Mermaid, F/F, Illustrations, Isolation, MerMay 2018, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-31
Updated: 2018-06-25
Packaged: 2019-05-06 20:32:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 24,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14655651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyborgShepard/pseuds/CyborgShepard
Summary: Moira swallows her shock and wets her dry lips. When she speaks her voice is even. “Where are you from?”Above her the mermaid sucks a breath, but the words never come. She’s silent so long that by the time Moira has almost finished she half forgets she ever spoke.But she eventually says, “from the same place as you.”





	1. What the Water Gave Me

**Author's Note:**

> Written for MerMay, inspired by a [doodle](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/377928866716712962/442093843278725122/Schermafbeelding_2018-05-05_om_00.41.39.png) of mermaid!Angela by [Begging-For-Mercy](https://begging-for-mercy.tumblr.com/). Heavy warnings for injury and smoking kink. Seriously, Moira's so sad and she smokes so much, it's like Carol up in here.
> 
> Now with beautiful art by the insanely talented [Bongolicious!! ](https://tugboat-overwatch.tumblr.com/)

There is a house, she remembers. Small and made of wood and stone, settled against the bottom of the mountains, where the sand turns to stones and craggy rock pools. It sits in a small croft, terraced off with rocks and vines, though she tries not to think about that. She’ll have to make it to the beach first, which is short, nestled between the broken cliffs and hidden on the east side of the island. It’s also a day’s swim at best; and she isn’t exactly at her best.

But she doesn’t think about that, and she grits her teeth against the way the icy water drags against the gash in her tail. She has to make it to the house, which is empty and alone and the farthest place anyone would think to look for her.

~*~

The fog isn’t unusual for this early in the morning. Rolling down off the dark green mountains to settle and blanket her little pocket of the island, Moira guesses it’ll cling for a few hours yet. The air is sharp but her lungs are warm, the orange tip of her cigarette the only light competing with the grey sun, which bobs on the edge of the ocean. Moira drags, and holds the smoke for a beat. It curls into the wispy morning around her when she parts her thin, pale lips.

Inside she can hear the kettle start to whimper. The coffee was always the first thing to run out, and Moira dreads the headaches she knows she’s sure to get. It’s another month yet til she’s due back in town, and she rubs her eyes behind her round glasses.

It’s been a little over a year since she left the Citadel. For the first month of her isolation she never left the house, and lived in a stifling paranoia, fearing what could have been coming for her just over the crest of the mountains. They wouldn’t send an army for her; Moira isn’t worth that much trouble. The ghost of Amelie Lacroix would suffice, or perhaps Reyes himself would hunt her down: he always had a flare for the dramatic. But one month passed, and then two, and now twelve, and there’s only the silence. On the other side of the mountain and half a morning’s ride away is a little village, where no one cares to know her name, only what she’ll do for them.

The way she likes it.

Lonely. Safe.

As her cigarette burns down Moira leans against the cool banister where the wood is splitting and the whorls look like tiny galaxies. Perhaps there’s a universe out there where she’s somewhere hot, in a glimmering city where the sun is golden and the streets are white marble and there’s someone in her bed to keep the sheets warm at night. Perhaps there’s a Doctor Moira O’Deorain out there with an unsullied name an a future within her grasp. But if there’s one thing Moira knows, after everything, it isn’t this one. 

Because this one is grey. 

Swallowing down the last dregs of her cigarette before ashing it out on the banister Moira pulls on her coat tight and walks down from the porch to the path she’s worn in the grass. The net covering her small vegetable patch is glistening with morning dew, but there are no tears or other signs of scavengers visiting in the night. In their hutch, fenced-off, the hens chirp as she passes, not yet stirred by the slowly rising sun. With a sigh she considers the now-empty lot next to them, where her goat had pastured before winter hit. Perhaps if she saved and cut down on the tobacco she could afford another, but Moira considers the cost on her psyche, and rubs at her temple. 

The house is roughly fifty yards from the beach, which is monstered by two cliffs, flanking each side. Part of the beach is open, but one side is completely eaten up by rock pools, and a makeshift wharf that Moira rigged together when she first came here. From it she hangs her fishing lines -- when she has the time and when the weather permits -- and a tangle of crab boxes, which catch the traffic from the pools. Just beside where the wharf meets the sand is a large handmade pool, and Moira inspects it as she passes. All the critters skitter away from her shadow, the fish not yet fat enough to be worth eating.

The wharf creaks underfoot as Moira gently treads onto it, and the freezing water gently laps over her boots as she walks the ten or so paces down to her nets. She winces when the water finds a split seam to creep into, soaking her socks. She really should try to find more work, even if that means travelling further. 

It’s as Moira is tugging the nets up that she spots it, from the corner of her eye and partially obscured by the cliffside, and where the rocks begin to grow into boulders. It’s distant, a speck of white against the black, and Moira squints and wipes at her glasses. But it’s there, pale as the moon, limpid and sprawling. 

The crabs wriggle over each other in the net, but Moira is already halfway down the wharf and there’s a strange lump in her throat that takes her back to a year ago. The sand crunches wetly under her boots as Moira runs to the rock pools, and she steps easily across the surface. Knowing which rocks to trust is like muscle memory, and she doesn’t even mind the cold when she steps into shin-deep water and her boots flood. The further she travels the slower she becomes, though, because the rocks are as tall as her and the pools begin to spread for metres, each one home to a different little world. The water is black and inky with seaweed, and Moira has half a mind to turn around, go back to the beach, wait for the tide to come in and do what she does best. 

But she holds onto the cragged cliff and pulls herself around to the other side, where there’s a plateau of rock smoothed by the water, and Moira can spy where it hangs on the edge, and now that she’s closer she can see all the brown dried on the grey stone, and smell the blood.

The body’s blonde hair has been bleached by the sun and fans out around it, covering its face and tangled with debris and dried seaweed. Its arms lay at angles beside it, but Moira still can’t see the legs. She throws a look up over her shoulder at the cliffside, but quickly rules out the possibility when the splatter pattern isn’t nearly as great as it would be had she jumped. That, and the woman would be in much more of a broken state.

A drowning, then, Moira assumes, crossing the rock shelf, although the body isn’t nearly bloated enough. Perhaps she died overnight, caught by a rip from up the island coast or fallen from a boat too far from shore. The lump in Moira’s throat doesn’t shift. Her boots squelch wetly, and for all the rush she was in to reach the body now she slows, her breathing shallow.

It’s not as though she’s never seen a dead body before. The devil knows she’s even killed people, but this is different. Alone like this, everything is.

Moira doesn’t notice it at first, but the blood across the rocks is shifting from brown to red, dried to fresh. Her boots track through it, thick and sticky but she hardly notices. Moira crouches, and tentatively reaches out with fingers not trembling from the chill, and pinches a tress of brittle hair off the woman’s gaunt face, and she looks almost peaceful, like it’s only sleep.

Then the water surges up over the edge and across the shelf, rocking the body gently towards Moira, splashing over its neck, and with a grunt Moira falls back onto the seat of her britches and watches as it floats towards her. The water pushes it off the edge of the rock, and it’s then that Moira realises, feeling like her breath has been punched from her, that the woman never had legs.

She has a tail, thick and long and tipped with translucent, paper-thin fins; a tail which is sliced open and oozing thick, shimmering blood. She watches it ribboning in the icy water. Faded scales dance up over her waist and belly, to her ribs which show through her skin and her small breasts which are revealed when the water moves her hair up around her throat. Her mouth lolls open, and her teeth are sharp knife-like things that hide behind her peeling lips.

Moira stares incredulously, and reminds herself to breathe. She looks from the tail, the wound, to the rest of the mermaid, and then the foamy water recedes, pulling her hair with it, and Moira watches as three little slits open on each side of her neck, fluttering weakly.

And frozen, Moira watches as the tide begins to drag her back across the rock shelf towards the ocean, and not for the first time in her life Moira does something implausibly stupid.

~

Inside, the kettle is screaming, and Moira nearly falls over over a kitchen chair when she finally gets the door open and pulls the mermaid into the house. Her back slams against the wall that separates the front of the hut and the back, where her bed and a tub sit, and Moira groans, winded. The mermaid’s tail is wet with blood and sand and dirt has stuck in the gash, which is still weeping lazily. Moira tentatively lowers her to the floor and she slumps against the wall, catching her breath for a moment while her muscles scream at her. She goes to pass a hand over her face and rub her eyes under her glasses but at the last minute she spies the red dying her skin, and balls it at her side, instead. 

For a moment she watches the mermaid, who hasn’t stirred once, even though her gills are still shifting. Eyes fixed and breathless, Moira peels herself out of her coat, and resists the very strong urge to swear aloud.

There’s no one who would hear her -- the town and its people are hours away -- but hearing her own voice might shatter the illusion that this is just a very bad and very twisted dream.

Moira turns and moves the kettle to a different hotplate, secretly distracting herself and pausing to fumble with the kitchen faucet, turning it on blast and scrubbing her hands in the frozen water. The pipes groan wearily but Moira lets the basin fill, the cream porcelain turning a sick, salmon-flesh kind of pink, and she throws her glasses down on the counter to splash the cold water on her face.

When she looks over her shoulder the mermaid is still there on the floor, her tail half hanging out of the door, and Moira purses her lips.

 _You should have left her,_ she thinks to herself as she pushes her hair off her face and slicks it back with water. _You should have let the ocean take her home._

But she didn’t. Moira finds her glasses and pushes them back over her ears, and she can see her reflection in the window above the sink. Beyond her face the sun is slowly rising on the other side of the mountains, and the light gradually reaches her little dark pocket of the island, bleeding in greys and whites.

She lets herself have this strange moment, and thinks back to an hour ago, when the morning promised a day the same as any other. She shuts her eyes so tight, but there are no lights or stars that dance in the darkness. There’s just black, there’s only nothingness.

Behind her the mermaid makes a strange noise: an almost-moan, high pitched and airy and in pain.

Resigned, Moira opens one of the cupboards above the counter, and she pulls out a steel dish, and she roots around in her bottles, eyes flicking over tattered, fading labels till she finds what she wants.

When she does, she pops the cap on the remnants her vodka and takes a healthy swig before she empties it into the bowl.

~

“What do you think is out there?” Jesse asks, leaning dangerously far forward over the fence. 

“We know what’s out there,” says Gabe dryly, rolling his eyes, and Moira raises a thin eyebrow at him when he shares his exasperated expression with her. “That’s why we go hunting.”

“Yeah,” Jesse says, like Gabe and Moira are the idiots, “I mean, they must have resources, technology. They must live in tribes, or -- schools? They’ve got to survive somehow.”

Gabe’s silent a moment, before he hums, idly patting his pockets for his lighter. Moira offers him hers.

“Thick skin to regulate body temperature in the freezing waters, heightened senses to perceive what surrounds them in the depths, where the sun doesn’t reach.” Moira watches the ocean from behind tendrils of blue smoke, the bobbing ships so far from them they’re no bigger than her hand. “I speculate they use some kind of echolocation to communicate. Perhaps they have a language. I wouldn’t know; I’m only brought dead ones.”

Jesse chuckles. “Perhaps you should put in a request for a live one this time, doc.”

“Tribes,” Gabe murmurs softly to himself on a plume of smoke.

~

”Fuck,” Moira spits as her slippery fingers drop the needle, and it’s the first word she’s said aloud in two weeks.

Even with her glasses it’s hard to spy, blending in against the shimmery white scales on the mermaid’s tail. It’s threaded to the almost-sealed gash which stopped bleeding after she cauterised it. That doesn’t mean there isn’t blood coating everything up to her elbows, though, and Moira smacks her tongue in irritation when she thinks about the staining to the dining table.

It’s well past midday by now, though she hasn’t checked her clock yet. The world outside her streaky windows has lit up considerably since she last glanced at it, but despite how much time has passed the mermaid hasn’t stopped breathing, so she figures she must be doing something right. Once she pulls these stitches she’s more-or-less finished, til she figures out just how much blood is too much for a mermaid to lose. 

Not that there’s anything Moira can do about it, she thinks bitterly, pinching the needle and ignoring the smart in her back for how she bends over the table. She throws a look over at her case, sitting on the bottom shelf of her scant bookcase, and spits under her breath. There isn't enough to spare. 

She'll just have to wait it out. 

The black thread its stark and brutal against the white fleshy belly of the mermaid’s tail, and crosses her from left to right. She’s unlike any of the other mermaids Moira has come into contact with, in that her tail is a pied mix of greys and white, rather than the shimmering creams that seem to be predominate amongst the mainland’s pods. What is also unique is that she has a set of pelvic fins as well as her pectoral; one of which is white with scarring, the lacerations never healed properly, and it looks like a wire cut at first glance.

Moira eyes the cut as she pulls the final stitches through. She knows what kind of cut this is, knows the kind of trouble that warrants it. She ties off the knot with careful fingers and a distant mind, and then while the creature sleeps she fills the tub and tests the water with her elbow. When it’s just below lukewarm she shucks her shirt and moves the chairs to the side of the small room, all the better to drag the mermaid the five short paces into her living space at the back. Moira groans in strain as she hooks her arms under her and shuffles backwards til her legs hit the porcelain. Then, she gently tries to fold as much of the mermaid in the tub as possible; the water at least covers her cut and the parts of her tail most coated in blood and gore. She passes a cloth over the stitched gash, and tries not to think about what she’s doing.

What would Gabe say if he saw her now? Perhaps he’d not so much as say anything, he’d let his gun do all the talking. Perhaps that’d be for the best.

It’s not as though Gabe’s going to find her any time soon. She reminds herself of this often, but she’s thankful the hallucinations have stopped. Glancing down at the mermaid’s tail idly Moira wonders if they’ll start back up again, now that a little part of Gabe is in her life. Moira looses a steady breath. The mermaid hasn’t moved or made a sound, as dead as she was on the rocks, and Moira leaves her wedged in the tub in lieu of finding her belts. They lay forgotten under her small bed, and when she pulls the mermaid from the bath and straps her onto a chair by the wall she feels like she never even left her laboratory, or the Citadel.

Then she sits. 

Then she waits.

And when her ashtray is filled and an hour of nothing has passed Moira pushes herself into the kitchen and frustrated -- at herself, mostly -- pulls her pots off the overhang above the stove.

~

When Gabe hits the docks the first thing he does is spit a mouthful of blood down Moira’s front.

The second thing he does is suck a ragged breath, and on it he decrees: “I’ll kill them _all._ ”

Moira purses her lips and watches as the split tearing open his face leaks rapidly down his chin, and down her arms where she’s holding him. His eyes are wild pinpricks of black, and stare past her when he looks up. Moira traps a disappointed sigh before it can escape and cause more detriment, and throws a sly glance at Jesse, on the edge of the pier.

Jesse’s staring into the _somewhere else_ as well, but the boy also looks like he’s pissed his britches, so Moira doesn’t diagnose him with bloodlust, merely being shit-scared. “What happened?” Her voice is crisp. She ignores the citizens all stumbling over their boots when they realise that the red is _blood_ and it’s coming from the Admiral.

Gabe only growls in response and flecks of muddled spit hit her white waistcoat, and Moira’s lip twitches in irritation. “They’ve- got claws,” Jesse splutters when no one says anything, and Moira peers at the slashes across Gabe’s right cheek. Two thicker, two merely scratches under his eye and above his jaw. It’s hard to tell through all the visceral, and the fact that his teeth are showing through is mildly distracting _,_ but the entry tears match her mental image of their hands, on which she has a whole file.

Moira sniffs, and slings Gabe’s arm over her shoulder. “Why were you up so close?”

Gabe doesn’t answer her, and for once Jesse stays quiet. Perhaps they haven’t conjured a lie yet, too hyped up on all the adrenaline. 

“I told you,” Moira mutters through her teeth, and the crowd parts a wide berth for them, “to stay away from them.”

He sounds like a horse snuffling when he blows hot air through his mouth, and Moira clicks her tongue when he grimaces. “They have something.”

“Something worth dying for?”

Moira doesn’t see Gabe’s eyes but she doesn’t need to. A sol-car stops abruptly for them, perhaps hailed by Morrison spying on them from his vantage point at the castle, and as Moira lowers him in Gabe husks, “yes.”

 ~

When Moira left the Citadel she took nothing but her briefcase, a satchel of clothes, and enough gold to last the winter and then some, and she's been frugal. In a concealed, dark study off of her examination room she left all her work, years of it, a hundred diaries fat with knowledge, and she hurried a few paces down the empty hallway outside til the fire flickering inside a wall sconce caught her eye. She took that, too, and the kerosene from one of her lamps, and any chance of Gabriel Reyes ever having her research. It had ripped something hollow into her, watching as the leatherbound books curled and warped and bubbled, and the pages crisped. That emptiness had never been cauterised, and often Moira finds herself wishing she’d taken just one book, to be merely a trinket of sentiment in her isolation.

But now, for the first time in a year, Moira wishes she’d taken _anything_ more than ever, because she’s watching the mermaid from the kitchen and she can’t figure her out. 

The soup in the pot simmers gently but Moira pays it no mind. She has her head cocked and her lips around a cigarette, but it’s as though the more she analyses the creature the more confused she finds herself. That extra set of fins and her colouration had been immediate flags to Moira that this mermaid wasn’t of the mainland, or even this tiny island, because she’s seen the pods around here before. ‘

A juvenile had found itself wrapped in one of her nets. A year ago, she would have reeled it in, and never let it free.

But knelt on the wharf as the water splashed up against her chest, Moira cut its white shimmering tail free before it could introduce her thorax to the bitter, wet air. When she stood, the broodmother was merely twenty paces away, and offered her a flash of white before it dove back into the waves.

All white, and the scales only covered up to what would have been their navel. Their fingers were tipped with long grey talons, more an extension of the finger itself than a nail. This mermaid has nothing of the kind, and while Moira isn’t close she can see neat rounded nails, perhaps a little long to be considered human. Her fingers are webbed. But nothing like the weapons used to shred Gabriel’s face. 

Back, when she first began studying the kind, Moira initially assumed that they migrated with the seasons, for the winters on the mainland were more bitter than death. Then, when their ship had pulled in the same male that they had lost in the summer, Moira pursed her lips, and jotted down a note in her travel diary as Gabe pulled his pistol from his waist.

So it’s confusing, that for the first time in eight years, with no explanation, Moira finds herself a different kind of mermaid. 

For a second she enjoys the idea that she’s the first to discover this breed, which would mean no one on the Citadel knows about her, either. But then she holds her smoke and eyes the cut across the mermaid’s tail, so deep it almost hits bone, and knows that she didn’t merely find herself in a fisherman’s net.

It’s healed up well in the few hours passed since Moira stitched it, and at one point Moira pulled the mermaid’s hair back, all the better for keeping an eye on her fluttering gills. Their twitching is stronger now, and there’s a little colour high up on her cheeks.

When she finishes her cigarette she pours a bowl of soup, and places it with a mug of water on the table. Then she pulls a chair around and sits facing the mermaid, her left knee bouncing incessantly.

And she waits, because her skin is too tight to get any chores done and her nerves feel shocked, as though she just got caught with her hand in the proverbial cookie jar. Because now, the jar is a six-and-a-half foot long mermaid that she decided she needed to save, as if in some penance for all her past actions. That, and finding her has been the most interesting thing to happen to Moira in a very long time.

Eventually, as the sun begins to set, the mermaid’s gills begin to open and shut in a pattern, fluttering even and steady and strong. Globs of blood beads along the stitching in her tail, but don’t break to trickle down her scales.

Eventually, as Moira’s bent over her knees and lighting herself up, the mermaid wakes. 

The cigarette would have slipped from her slack mouth had it not been for the damp on her lips and the paper of the filter; the mermaid blinks slowly at her, owlishly and unfocused, and Moira could never have guessed her piercing eyes would be such a crystalline shade of blue, so unlike the choppy sea she came from. 

For a still handful of seconds neither of them breathe as Moira’s heart thunders and the mermaid’s eyes narrow. Then the creature seems to realise her bindings, and Moira startles when she peels back her lips and snarls.

She writhes in the chair, its legs scratch over the stone floor. Her eyes are wide now, and there’s a hate there that’s unmaskable and unmistakable. The kind of misguided, fearful glimmer that burnt in Gabe’s eyes, all that time ago.

“Hey,” Moira yells, cigarette on her lip and her hands out in front of her. “Calm yourself.”

The mermaid spits at her, and her skin goes red behind the leather belt across her chest. Moira purses her lips, but she keeps her right hand placatingly in front of her as she glances behind herself to find her chair and sit in it.

This wasn’t exactly how she thought things would go, but then again, she didn’t plan to find a dying mermaid this morning, either. 

There’s silence for a second while Moira regards her. Then she leans back in her chair.

“Do you speak Basic? Centraal?” Moira frowns and takes a short drag of her smoke. “I know your kind can talk.” 

Nothing.

“Are you from the South?” Moira clicks her tongue in a pattern, but she gets no response. Not even a twitch of the lip. Not even an upward flick of the eyes. All the mermaid does is stare down at Moira’s chair as though she wants to tear it apart with her teeth.

Moira slouches back, kicking her legs out in front of her to cross them at the ankle, and she rests her elbow on the rickety table behind her. This isn’t going to work. She doesn’t know why she thought it might. She could take the mermaid into town and sell her for a few quarts, enough to procure perhaps a new goat and some warmer clothes for the encroaching winter. Winston would take her, though Moira would only receive the moral reward as payment. She scratches her chin. If she turned her over to the navy, she might even be able to afford the goat and leather boots and a new bike.

The mermaid snorts, and tries her binds again. Moira has to resist the urge to roll her eyes, instead reaching behind her for the bowl of soup.

“You must be starving.” She winces when Moira blows her smoke through her nose, idly Moira wonders if the tobacco hurts her. “Just talk to me. Make me trust that you won’t tear my face off the moment your hands are free.” 

Still she won’t look at her, but then the mermaid shakes her head harshly, her hair falling over her front, and her eyes fixed to the bowl.

“Why not?” 

The mermaid snorts again, and she throws her long thick hair back over her shoulder, if only so she can shake her head more clearly.

Moira can’t help but sigh, and when she plucks her cigarette from between her lips she notices all the dried blood around her cuticles. All of a sudden, it feels like she’s been awake for months.

With a new bike she could get to and from the town faster to see more patients, to make more money. A nice solarbike, maybe even with a caddy, for groceries, or a perhaps a lady. Moira sighs. She finishes her cigarette.

Moira rubs the bridge of her nose under her glasses. “Will you attack me?” 

She gets a harsh glare in reply, but then, finally, a single shake of the head.

Moira taps her fingers against her knee, then she asks, “you can feed yourself?”

The mermaid rolls her eyes, Moira exhales and shakes her head. “You’re going to have to talk eventually.”

She fiddles with the buckles, pulling them loose. Her fingers brush the mermaid’s breast accidentally, and she flushes, but when she glances up the mermaid is unfazed and only frowning at her hair like she’s never seen the shade before. 

She clears her throat. “My name is Moira, so you know. You’re on an island east of the mainland.”

She passes her the bowl of soup, but the mermaid frowns as she takes it, stirring it a little with the spoon.

“Not where you thought you’d be?”

Moira doesn’t know how long it’ll take her to get used to those strange eyes. The mermaid looks at her for an unnaturally long amount of time, til she seems to find what she’s looking for, and tentatively sips a spoonful of broth.

~

The first night is strange. Moira doesn’t sleep, though she watches as the mermaid does. She’s on her singlespring mattress, the fins of her tail hanging over the edge and a thin blanket over as much of her as Moira could manage. Her gills have sealed, her lungs finally taking over, and her breathing is deep and heavy. Moira's clock tells her it’s half one, and outside in the thick of night the rain is pouring down. 

And there’s a feeling rattling in Moira’s chest that she can’t dim, which started when she saw the mermaid on the rocks from the farthest corner of her eye and hasn’t stopped once. Perhaps it’s her soul reconciling the irony in this, or fear that this is some higher power unsatisfied with her isolation and seeking to punish her further. Moira dashes that notion, leaning back in her chair and staring at the rafters. It’s not as if the mermaid found herself in her bed by happenstance.

At some point Moira’s eyes drift shut and she lets them. The possibility lingers that the mermaid could wake in the night and take her chance, but Moira knows the creature isn’t stupid, and knows the beach is too far to get to unaided.

Unless she kills Moira, waits for her tail to heal, and crawls. Moira’s lips twitch. But that wouldn’t be punishment at all. 

So Moira lets herself sleep, despite the feeling knocking and the mermaid in her bed.

~

When Moira wakes the first thing she sees is the creature on the stone floor, and the first thing she hears is her weeping.

It’s dark in the house, the only light the smoldering fire from the kitchen stove behind them, but it catches in her blonde hair and makes it glow. Rain smacks against the glass, and while the storm has simmered the wind blows heavy and makes the beams creak. The sun hasn’t woken yet, though dawn won’t be far off. Moira’s freezing, still in her button down and britches from the day before.

And the mermaid is still here in her house and not just a dream.

She doesn’t realise Moira is awake til she squats over her and whispers quietly, and the mermaid skitters back across the stone. She groans in pain when she hits an uneven edge. Moira clicks her tongue. 

“Come on, you have to help me,” she murmurs, eyes still heavy with sleep, and she manages to get her hands under her. Her body is colder than Moira expected, but she gets her onto the bed, and she uses the blanket’s corner to wipe away her tears.

Moira slumps to the floor, against the frame of the bed. Her back is sore, but she ignores it, and shuts her eyes.

“You’re alright. Go to sleep.”

~

In the morning -- the real morning -- Moira makes her way down to the shore, and she waits til the tide draws back before she hunts in the rockpools. Small crabs scurry away from her prying hands but have nowhere to hide before she plucks them from their pools and drops them in her bucket. She tugs on a bundle of seaweed til comes loose and she collects that, too. For a second she lets herself glance at the rockshelf where she found the mermaid, and the waves smash against the stone. Moira entertains the small fantasy that the sea is angry at her, and she’d agree it has a right to be, though not for this.

Her nets are full when she pulls them in, though the crab box from the day before sits empty on the wharf. She throws it back in with a sigh, watches it slowly sink beneath the grey. A small voice in her head huffs that she barely has enough food for one mouth, let alone two, but Moira ignores it and walks back up the sand and the grass and the terrace, and leaves the bucket by the door while she checks the hens. 

Inside the house the mermaid is awake but doesn’t move from her bundle, and she looks young with her tail pressed up to her chest, like a child hugging its knees. Moira wonders about the strain to her wound, but perhaps the mermaid is suffering the pain in order to keep the degree to which it has healed overnight a secret. 

Moira huffs a laugh, peeling out of her coat and sitting the bucket by the sink. “How do you like your eggs?” she asks the silence, bitterly, flicking on the stove and stoking the fire, and as she fills the kettle she lets her forehead press against the cold, foggy glass.

 _What are you doing_ ? asks a voice in her head that sounds suspiciously like Gabe’s. Moira resists the urge to respond to it, partly because she just _doesn’t know._

~

It’s three days before the mermaid makes another sound, and when she does it’s as Moira is cleaning her wound and she tugs on a stitch.

The hiss is high pitched and morphs into a groan when Moira sits back on her haunches to watch her face. The cut is almost completely healed, and Moira’s mildly surprised; she’d guessed it’d take a week at best. While the scales on the wound haven’t repaired themselves the flesh is white and raised, gradually turning into scar. 

“You know,” Moira says, and she’s gotten used to talking to herself, “these have to come out soon.”

“Then why can’t you do it now,” bites an accented voice, gravelly with disuse. 

“Because-” Moira starts, and then she realises that this isn’t a one sided conversation with her mind at all, and she pushes herself to her feet, her knuckles white. The mermaid flicks her fins like a cat might in irritation, and her eyes are narrowed, and fixed to Moira, who stands silent and still with her mind flatlining. 

She doesn’t know what she could possibly say that wouldn’t make her sound completely stupid, so she lets her mouth fall open instead.

“Take out your stitches,” repeats the mermaid, leaning back against the bed’s header.

Moira wets her lips and clears her throat, and as if on autopilot reaches for her tool roll. With how rapidly the mermaid is repairing herself Moira sees no threats in removing the stitches, but she doesn’t tell her that. 

Moira doesn’t look at her as she kneels on the stone floor and sets to work, and she tries to hide that her fingers are shaking. Instead she focuses on the facts. The mermaid’s speaking Basic, with an accent Moira can’t place, but that could simply be because she’s never spoken with a human. Her eyes are untrusting and fixed to Moira as she begins to hook the thread and tug, pinching the loose ends and pulling them through her skin. Aside from a small noise of discomfort she makes no other sound; if anything that scares Moira more.

                        

She’s spoken with the creatures before, briefly, back at the Citadel. But that was when she had them tied to her table, and when she was in control.

She needs to get that back, now, so Moira swallows her shock and wets her dry lips. When she speaks her voice is even. “Where are you from?”

Moira works steadily, dropping the slivers of thread in a pile by her right knee. Above her the mermaid sucks a breath, but the words never come. She’s silent so long that by the time Moira has almost finished she half forgets she ever spoke. 

But she eventually says, “from the same place as you.”

Moira does glance up at her then, from under her brow, but the twist on the mermaid’s face is sad and strange, so she looks away. “I’ve never seen you before.” 

The mermaid huffs something that could be a laugh, and when Moira shuts her eyes she can see bubbles floating from her mouth and her hair dancing around her, and water ripples from her gills. “You wouldn’t have.”

The last thread comes loose, and Moira looks over the angry pinpricks of holes either side of the wound. She reaches for her salve, nestled in a pocket of the roll. “Do you have a name?” she asks, tentatively rubbing over the scar. The cream is rather pointless, she realises midway through, but the mermaid hasn’t flinched away from her touch yet.

Or kicked her with her tail, instantly breaking her neck.

This time, she replies quickly. “I can’t tell you.”

Moira nearly asks why, but bites her tongue. She doesn’t want to push her luck. So instead she says, “Make up one, something for me to call you.” When she stands her knees pop, and she stretches her back. “I told you I was Moira.”

“I only know one human name. Angela.”

Moira offers her a smile, small and slight and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it. “Angela it is, then.”

It’s a pretty name. It suits her, even if it isn’t hers by birth. None of the other mermaids ever told her their names; for all Moira knows they could assign numbers to themselves. But Angela makes her think of gold and white marble, of the sun. 

God, she’s been alone too long. 

“I have a question,” Angela asks, scrutinising her face in such a way Moira feels her ears heat. “You must answer it.”

Moira nods, rather than agrees outwardly, and she waits.

Angela looks down her tail, her eyes hard and her mouth a sharp line. She looks up at Moira. “How many of my people did you kill?”

 


	2. What the Water Gave Us

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A big big thank you to everyone for your lovely comments and your kudos! It means a lot! 
> 
> If you haven't already check out Bongolicious' art that I included in the first chapter, and give her some love <3  
> Edit: [ Now with even more!! ](https://tugboat-overwatch.tumblr.com/post/175253142475/some-more-fan-art-for-what-the-water-gave-by)
> 
> This second part of the story has a content warning for a brief reference to a minor character's attempted suicide, but nevertheless read at your own discretion.

_My babe would never fret none_  
_About what my hands and my body done_  
_If the Lord don't forgive me_  
_I'd still have my baby and my babe would have me_  
_When I was kissin' on my baby_  
_And she put her love down soft and sweet_  
_In the low lamp light I was free_  
_Heaven and hell were words to[me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH7bjV0Q_44)_

“Do it,” Gabe yells, his eyes red and black and full of something Moira can’t look at for too long. “I order you to!”

And it hurts her, enough to make her own odd eyes sting and her vision blur. It hurts her because he’s her friend, and she loves him.

“Moira, _now_!”

But he’s her admiral, too.

Moira lines the needle to the crook of his elbow, and slides it in deep.

~

“Moira!” booms Winston, and the smile on his face holds enough beaming delight to brighten the entirety of the grey little town. “Good to see you again!”

At this point Moira knows not to even try to resist his rib-crushing embrace, and she also knows not to sigh, because it’s the only air she’ll have in her lungs while he gradually constricts her.

Winston’s the only other human who’ll touch her, though, so it’s not like she’s complaining.

With a pat to his shoulder (which always feels like tapping out of a boxing ring) Moira pulls away, and even though she towers over almost everyone on the mainland, Winston is as tall as her, and about five times as stocky.

“It’s good to see you too,” she says with a smile, and it’s true. “Though I will admit it, it hardly feels like much time has passed at all.”

“A whole month!” Winston cries. “A whole month of happenings to catch up on!”

Moira rolls her eyes but it’s lost behind her riding goggles, which she pulls down around her neck to replace with her spectacles, folded away in the pocket of her overcoat. Her riding gloves get shoved in her trousers after she struggles to peel them off. “Don’t tell me Donogan’s son is selling trout for more quarts than it’s worth again.”

“Hah, not funny.” Winston's voice is flat. He walks back through the doorway, and Moira props her bike under the window box and unclips her case from the back. He throws a glare over his shoulder just as Moira passes the threshold, and says, incredibly serious, “because he is.”

“If this was the Citadel they’d string him by his boots,” Moira jabs.

“Aren’t _we_ glad it isn’t,” Winston says dryly. He leads her into the living room of his terrace house. No matter how many times Moira visits, she always gets the same claustrophobic feeling; the top of her head always brushes the ceiling, and she’s smacked her forehead on doorframes too many times to count.

Two cozy sofas bracket a small, circular coffee table where a slew of papers and empty tea cups have taken up residence, and Winston chuckles nervously as he collects them and takes them into the adjoining kitchenette, to Moira’s right. Cases overflowing with books that are stuffed in every available orifice line the walls, a million lifetimes’ worth of knowledge that Moira has already poured over most of. The fire is crackling happily in the little hearth and Moira throws her coat over the arm of one couch and settles her bag against the foot. She keeps her scarf wrapped around her neck and her cardigan on, though, and stands in front of the fire to warm her bones.

“Any news?” she calls into the kitchen, hoping she’s heard over the sound of Winston fighting with the kettle.

“Nothing over the radio, haven’t heard any chatter, either,” she strains to hear.

Good. Perfect. There’s a piece of her chest that has been wound up tight for the last month, especially ever since Angela, and now it looses and she feels like she can breathe properly once more.

“Tea?” Winston pipes, poking his head through the doorway.

Moira groans, flopping onto her preferred couch. “Please, coffee. I ran out.”

“You always run out.”

It’s easy, like it always has been. Moira suspects a thousand years could pass but Winston would still open his door for her and offer her a tired smile. She leans back into the plush couch, running her fingers through her hair and shaking the morning mist from it. It’s easy to shut her eyes behind her glasses, too, and to let the fire colour her cheeks a little.

“Don’t fall asleep on me,” Winston warns when he returns, setting a mug of milky coffee on her side of the table, using an old newspaper as a coaster. “I still need your help.

“I found paneling off of an old sol-car, and I’ve fixed the wiring,” he continues, itching in his sweater when the fire warms him too much. “As well as the usual, if you agree.”

“Of course,” Moira says tenderly.

The smile he gives her is sad, his bright blue eyes far away, and he strokes the side of his cup with his thumb. They sit in the moment, because it’s always the hardest part of this trip. But then Moira clears her throat, and she has Winston’s full attention.

“I was wondering,” Moira says pleasantly, carefully, “if I might be able to make another request this time.”

“Go ahead.”

She doesn’t mask herself with nonchalance, because Winston is too perceptive for that. So she says, focusing on her coffee and frowning as though she just heard gossip, “I only wondered if you had any of the old encyclopaedias, or any of the journals.”

“Moira,” Winston warns, eyes narrowed, “you’d better not want what I think you do.”

“Not for anything-- anything that I used to-” Moira licks her lips, and decides that this is like a bandage: there’s only one way to open the wound and that’s to do it quickly. “I simply have found myself taking up residence with a merperson.”

Winston almost drops his tea. His mouth is hanging wide and his eyes are almost popping behind his half-moon spectacles; Moira flushes, but convinces herself it’s because of the fire.

“What do you mean?” he asks, his voice crescendoing. “Are you-”

He gapes.

Moira almost chokes on her coffee.

“No,” she manages, sounding deceptively calm even as she’s coughing. Winston’s smiling now, though, and something in her crumples in defeat. “No, I simply found her, that’s all.”

“Her?” Winston teases, a furry eyebrow arched.

It’s the fire turning her cheeks red; it _is._

Moira clears her throat, and ignores the way her heart is twisting on every second beat. “Listen to me. She isn’t like others, and I don’t know why. She only told me she was from the mainland.”

Winston hums, scratching his chin. “How interesting. And she won’t tell you much else?”

Moira shakes her head. “But I thought you might have heard something. They’d tried to take her tail.”

Winston clicks his tongue angrily, frowning as though his tea has gone sour. “They still do that barbaric ‘tradition’?”

Moira would know it anywhere. Angela hadn’t just found herself on the wrong side of an angry fisherman, or caught in rips that would throw her at jagged rocks. Her wound was a deliberate thing.

Maybe one of the sailors held her up by her hair, and another kept her arms behind her back, so another could draw his sword and place the flat of it to her belly--

“I’m sorry,” Winston murmurs, and he looks it, too. “I don’t have anything. Everything… I destroyed it.”

“No, please don’t be.” Moira waves him off, and downs the dregs of her coffee. “I do love a good mystery, but we’re all allowed our secrets.”

“Even mermaids.”

Moira almost laughs. “Yes. Even the merfolk.”

Winston sighs, and dejectedly leaves the rest of the tea on the table. “I suppose we best get to it, then, hadn’t we.”

They’re silent as Moira shimmies back into her coat and pulls on her gloves, and Winston tugs on his hat. Moira’s case tinkers when she picks it up, and her knuckles are white around the handle where she holds it as though it’s a lifeline.

It is. Just not exactly her’s.

The walk isn’t far so Moira leaves her bike with Winston’s solar-car, and besides, she prefers the stroll. The cobblestoned streets are lined with engraved red bricks, spinning a tale in a language long forgotten and smeared with mud. Children chase each other up and down the path, dodging the foot traffic and irritated glances. Only around a hundred families live in the village, nothing like the cities she became used to after she left her hometown, but the company warms something in her. Seeing _people_ \-- who aren’t pieces from her imagination or her memory -- is refreshing.

Winston’s cane clicks against the stones as he limps up the street, leading her past the docks and the men and women in their knee-high rubber boots, talking through their cigarettes and squabbling over catches. Some sit on crates with buckets between their knees, shucking oysters to sell fresh at the market stalls a block up, some are dozing, but none look their way.

He leads them leftwards down a small alley lined with rusty bicycles which opens into the main square. Here it’s busiest, a wide open space in front of the old town hall lined with small clothes shops and produce stores all red and brown and pressed together like boxes; and in the centre, in the brickwork, a blue star that points in every direction.

If Moira could have one material thing, it would be a painting of the square. Sometimes when she’s finished in the village, and before it gets too dark, she’ll sit on one of the blue wooden benches in front of the town hall and watch the square, as the lights in the shops flicker off and the lamps in the apartments above pop on, and the sky seems cloudless. The star itself is faded with age but still mapable with the eye, a compass at the centre of the town.

They follow it; north-east.

It’s always now when Moira’s throat gets tight. Winston shuffles into another little alley, tighter and darker than the last, following it til he brings them to a red door, with no number and no handle.

Winston throws her a look over his shoulder, like he always does before he knocks, but Moira only shuts her eyes and nods. It isn’t long before the door is being unlocked from the other side, and it’s hinges creak in a teeth-grinding way as it opens.

“You’re late,” Fareeha says, her eyes sharp and on Moira. Her black hair is pulled behind her in a short plait; it’s pretty.

“I’m sorry. I couldn’t come sooner.”

Fareeha’s eyes narrow, and she looks like she has a weapon of an insult dancing on her tongue -- and Moira thinks she can guess what it is --  but she stays silent and steps to the side, letting them in.

Somewhere, towards the front of the shop people are laughing, and Moira makes out a fuzzy ‘graph playing lazily. Fareeha doesn’t take them there, though, never has. She locks the door behind them and wastes no time in climbing the narrow, spiralling staircase to their right, her boots heavy on the wood and her knuckles white on the banister.

Every time she comes here it feels oddly surreal, as though she’s only walked these stairs in dreams and it’s deja vu, not a memory, to come to the landing, where three doors branch off into the bathroom, kitchen, and bedroom. Moira’s fingers itch for a cigarette, a nervous habit of comfort; she taps them against her britches while Fareeha unlocks the bedroom.

Dark and smelling like lavender and spice the room’s windows are draped with purple and red gentle silks, staining the creaking floor and the dozing woman on the double bed. Fareeha makes a strange sound that they all ignore, and goes to stand by the window, facing away and letting Moira into the room.

Moira kneels on the circular rug swallowing the floor and keeping out the winter chill, but she’s tall enough that the mattress only comes to her hip.

“Good morning, Captain Amari,” she says, very softly, and Winston sighs sadly behind her.

The woman on the bed is so broken she barely opens her eyes, her skin thin and her hands limp, even as Moira takes one and strokes her wrist with her thumb. In reply she gets a squeeze, or more accurately a twitch, and she nods.

Moira unclips her case and unfolds it carefully, and the six remaining syringes clink like diamonds in their straps.

The fluid inside them is ruddy brown and shimmering: only a few mils each, but enough.

Moira hopes no one can see the way she’s shaking as she takes Ana’s folded arm and rubs her cold fingers over the crook of her elbow, where a dozen of little shallow dips mark a constellation of injections.

It isn’t easy to take a needle and uncap it, tap it out and puff it. But it’s easy to line it Ana’s thin vein and tell her that she’s going to feel a slight jab.

~

No quicker than they’d arrived it’s over, and Fareeha is pushing a satchel of gold and quarts into Moira’s scarred hand and pushing her out the red door.

Winston hasn’t spoken since they arrived, and he doesn’t, not until they’re cleared of the square and are almost back at his terrace house.

When he does it catches Moira, deep in thought and staring out past the docks. His voice is low, and almost disappointed. “When were you going to tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

She can feel Winston’s irritation. “That you’re almost out.”

“Six months is more than anyone in her condition ever gets, let alone eighteen.” She feels horrible saying it, but that doesn’t make it untrue.

“Are you going to explain that to Fareeha?” Winston pauses before he unlocks his door, looking down, and not at Moira. “Don’t you think she deserves to know how long she has with her own mother?”

Moira sighs. “I’m sorry Winston. I truly am.”

It hurts, like it always has.

The wound in her chest still hasn’t healed. It never will.

“We have a deal--” Winston wets his lips, then he looks up at her, with something new in his eyes, “--could you ask your mermaid?”

 _No,_ Moira wants to cry, stern and resolute. Her throat tightens around the word. That part of her is over. That part of her is dead. Or as dead as it can be, haunting her from the shadows of her mind and curling in the purple veins of her right arm. The vials are all she has left of what she made, and for good reason.

But they have a deal.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she tells him with a terse smile, instead of anything absolute and damning.

“It means a lot, not just to Fareeha.” Winston smiles back, weak and tight-lipped. “Now I told you I had some paneling I’d fixed.”

“I was wondering, Winston,” she begins airily, following him down the hall and out into his small back courtyard, where a shed takes up the left corner and houses a plethora of strange wares. “You don’t happen to have a sidecar for the bike, do you?”

Winston huffs a laugh, and he throws her a look before he pulls the shed door open. “I have something better. I think you’re due for an upgrade, don’t you?”

~

“Moira!” Gabe sobs, and when Moira yanks open the old wood door to her quarters the first thing she sees is the broken body of Countess Lacroix in Gabe’s arms, and her husband behind them, white as a ghost.

It’s all too often that Moira’s finding her throat tight around a rock that doesn’t exist and her hands clammy, and as she leaves Gabe to strip her sheets and lay Lacroix on her bed she almost retches. Her legs shake but she pushes herself to run. At this hour the corridors are blissfully barren and the sconces are burning low. Moonlight chases her heels. Out the large windows, the sea is silver and harsh.

She pulls the key from her neck and shoves it into the lock, and the way her shadow twists her right hand makes her feel sick, and finally she admits that she’s _scared,_ but she shoulders into her lab. Then she finds the vials of shimmering, thick blood, and prays the thin glass doesn’t slip through her sweaty fingers.

“I haven’t perfected it yet,” Moira admits on a whisper, back in the room and hastily kneeling by the bed, but no one stops her. No one asks what might go wrong. So her hand slides across the stone floor as she blindly hunts for a belt and she almost flinches when her fingers brush one. She winds it tight beneath Amelie’s elbow, her mind stepping back from itself when her eyes fix on the crevasse going up her forearm. She breaks away to look up at the men, holding the end of the belt out to them.

Gerard is staring blankly. Gabe takes it. Without being told, he pulls it taut, and the bloodflow eases.

Moira takes a slow breath, and she uncaps a syringe, and she narrows her eyes as she transfers the blood just beneath her elbow.

She tells herself there’s no other way.

And after they get Amelie to a drip, safe in the infirmary, and after she wakes up, Moira realises that it didn’t work.

 

The memory is far away now, locked in an empty, scorched room and secured in her case, which is rattling in the sidecar of her new solar bike. Along with it is the panel that Winston fixed for her, and hessian bags filled with more groceries than she’s ever bought before.

Dirt clouds plume and settle behind her as she follows the road, and the setting sun is hot on her back. It isn’t long til she comes to the crest of the last hill and the road breaks away, dropping her down into the gully and to where her little house is nestled. Smoke chuffs from the chimney, and the windows are orange and warm.

Her bike rumbles, and hisses when she slows and eventually stops. She walks it to the verandah and kicks the stand on, and by the time she pulls off her goggles and loops them around the handlebars the front door is open and smell of something _amazing_ cooking is pooling out.

There’s a metallic creaking, and then a wooden one, and then a gentle voice. “Moira,” Angela says, looking down at her from her chair, “welcome back.”

With the light from inside around her she looks ethereal. Her hair is pulled into a thick plait over her shoulder, and she’s wearing Moira’s favourite red jumper, the sleeves rolled over her hands white hands. Moira clears her throat, and nods to the sidecar.

“I swapped my bike, it’s bigger now.”

Angela smiles, wheeling herself to the edge of the makeshift ramp that covers the old stairs. “Does that mean I can come next time?”

“As long as you don’t run over your tail in front of people.”

Angela pouts. “That’s only happened once.”

Moira almost laughs, but her smile is enough. She moves the panelling to the porch, where Angela inspects it with curious eyes and asks to watch her install it tomorrow, and she takes her bags inside to the table, which has been pushed against the wall to create more space.

“What’s for dinner?” Moira asks, nodding to the kitchenette. Though she was bitter over it ever since she came here, lately Moira’s grateful for how low the stove is. Or perhaps Angela is just abnormally tall. Moira wouldn’t be surprised.

“Just fish,” Angela says with a shrug, watching the bags.

“Well, it smells amazing.”

“You always say that.”

It’s easy. The last few weeks have been so easy, and so peaceful, and Moira has found herself smiling more than she ever thought she could.

Not to say that it wasn’t hard, initially. But once Moira knew her boundaries and once Angela accepted that she was safe, it worked.

Moira unpacks the bags quietly while Angela prods at her pans. Without a refrigerator most of her meats are dried and her pantry is brimming with non-perishables. She stacks the tins in the cupboard; tomatoes, corn, beans, all while easily accommodating enough space for Angela’s chair.

It was hard, initially, for Angela to adjust. But she did. Because she had to. There was no other option.

“Winston lent me some books,” Moira says, “we can read one tonight after dinner.”

Angela sighs, but she’s smiling. “I don’t think you’ll ever get me to understand on my own,” she huffs. “Your alphabet doesn’t make sense.”

Moira shrugs. “I don’t mind reading with you.”

“I’m glad.”

With the food away -- and a fresh tin of coffee settled on the counter and warming Moira’s heart whenever she glances at it -- Moira unclasps her side-bag, and the bottle of whiskey chinks softly against the wood of the table. It garners Angela’s attention, and she glances over her shoulder.

“What’s that?” she asks, though Moira’s sure she must know.

“A treat,” Moira calls it, sidling back into the kitchenette to reach for two, mismatched glasses. She steps around Angela’s chair to stretch up, bracing herself against a handle. Her belly is level with Angela’s mouth.

Then she pulls back and steps to the table, missing the way Angela exhales.

“People drink it when they celebrate, or when they need to forget.”

She gets a snort in reply. “That seems like a power too complicated for humans.”

“Don’t you have anything similar?” asks Moira, twisting the cap off the whiskey in one fluid motion.

“I suppose. But we never lose track of our inhibitions, unlike you.”

Moira gives her that, and she nods, pouring the alcohol into the bottom of the glass. “I appreciate the generalisation, but you’ve never drank with me before.” She holds the glass out to Angela, who takes it in with her fingers and cringes at the smell. “And I’ve never lost my restraint.”

Moira takes a hearty sip, her eyes never breaking away from Angela. It burns, and warmth pools in her head and fills her empty belly, but it’s pleasure she rarely dips her fingers in; and maybe it’s the knowing that she doesn’t do this often that makes her mouth tacky. She licks her wet lips, and watches as Angela eventually huffs, slouching on the arm of her chair and considering the drink.

“I assume we’re celebrating?”

“It was a good day,” Moira lies, raising her glass slightly.

Angela doesn’t argue that. She brings the rim of the glass to her lips, and she looks at Moira, her eyes as piercing as ever, and lets the liquid pool on her tongue.

When she swallows, she splutters, bringing the back of her hand to her mouth and looking away as she laughs. “Our vices never tasted like this!” she manages, and Moira smiles against her glass.

“See, that’s how you know it’s good.”

Angela looks at her for longer than she should, thinking something behind her pursed smile and her warm eyes before she leaves her whiskey on the table and wheels into the kitchen, pulling the fish off the stove. “I might go hunting again tomorrow,” she tells Moira, who only follows her so she can reach the plates for Angela. There’s only two, which is one more than Moira ever thought she needed, but she’s glad for it now.

“I just went to town,” Moira points out, “we’ve plenty food.”

Angela shrugs. “It couldn’t hurt to have more.”

Moira has never been much of a cook, and while it took a few tries before Angela learnt what flavours did and did not pair well, it hasn’t taken her long to develop the skill. Moira can’t even remember eating anything this delicious back at the castle, or perhaps it’s simply been that long.

When they finish Moira clears the plates, and when her glass is empty, and she’s finished Angela’s for her, she wheels her out to the latrine and lights a cigarette while she waits. It’s overcast tonight, the stars smothered by thick clouds that snuff out the moonlight. The sea is calm, though, lapping against the beach and rocking the wharf. Moira pulls her coat around her and sighs, thumbing the filter of her smoke idly.

With a careful step and delicate hand she opens the lid of the chicken hutch and peaks at the hens, who chirp and fluff themselves in the straw. Then she checks her vegetables and herbs and secures the frost-cover, and by the time she’s sucking heat Angela’s calling for her.

The chair had been a lucky find. It’d taken some fixing, and adjustment to the depth of the seat, but Angela fits well enough in it and can get herself around, even if Moira had to clear all the rocks from the grass and dig out the path down to the beach. Small sacrifices for… whatever this is.

Companionship, at the least. Penance for the rest.

After wheeling her back inside Moira draws her bath, watching the pipes shake and gurgle with a wary eye. For the first week Angela wouldn’t be convinced to wash, the notion going completely over her head. With a start Moira remembers the brown-paper package she bought in the village today, and leaves the steaming tub to fill as she rifles through the remaining bags by the door.

“Here,” she says, pulling apart the twine. “I bought you something today.”

She peels back the paper to reveal a small glass jar, no bigger than the palm of her hand but just as wide. The glass is a light blue, like sea foam, and Moira delicately plucks the lid off by the flower-shaped knob on its top.

“What is it?” Angela asks, squinting. Moira holds it out for her, ruffling the tiny crystals with her little finger.

“Smell it,” she says softly, and Angela flicks her eyes up briefly before leaning forward and inhaling.

She pulls away instantly, rubbing a sneeze back into her nose, and Moira laughs. “Not that deeply, or else the perfume will rip your lungs. They’re salts. Here,” she paces over to the tub, “take a pinch and sprinkle it in the water.”

Angela looks at her as though she’s crazy, but she still follows through, and her eyes go wide as the crystals fizzle and dissolve into the churning water. With one had Moira turns the faucets off, and as the surface settles a creamy layer of soapy bubbles form. The salts smell like lavender, which might be the one thing Moira misses from the mainland, and when she closes her eyes she can see the window boxes stuffed with purple, hanging on every house.   
  
There were fields of it, in her hometown, blanketing the hills and like a mirror to the twilight sky. 

“What’s the purpose?” Angela asks, and Moira blinks sleepily.

She shrugs, and settles the salts on as shelve on the bookcase. “They’re meant to help you relax. Sometimes you can get types with special soaps in them. Though, they’re a bit too expensive.”

Angela dips two fingers into the water and drags them through the white. “Come on,” says Moira, “lets get you in.”

By now Moira is used to seeing Angela without her shirt. A woman of science, Moira’s seen enough naked bodies to last a lifetime, and naturally is unfazed. She’s no stranger to nudity. But that doesn’t mean her heart doesn’t do a strange little beat in her hollow ribcage when Angela shakes her plait out of the collar of the jumper, and she stretches, the muscles across her chest tensing, til she goes lax, and her naked breasts settle.

Moira clears her throat, and she checks the water temperature for lack of something better to do. Then she helps Angela into the tub, and rubs her palms against her thighs to smother the tingles in the tips of her fingers.

“Thank you, Moira,” Angela murmurs, happily carding her fingers through the water.

Moira sniffs, fixing her glasses when the steam accosts her lenses. “You’re welcome.”

There’s more that Angela wants to say, but Moira doesn’t want to address it right now, too content and too sleepy in this near-stifling warmth. While Angela soaks Moira unfolds her bedroll and layers the blankets, down on the floor beside the legs of the table. Her fingers twitch for something to hold, but now that she no longer lives alone Moira tries not to divulge in the habit of smoking indoors, and she won’t deny that it’s probably better for her health.

But she itches. And the itch moves to her wrist, where it chases her veins and her bones, and spreads to the rungs of her ribs.

Her heart twitches funnily when she watches Angela sink under the water, her tail hanging out the side of the porcelain. Moira ignores it.

Angela doesn’t come back up for a long time.

~

Blood.

Thick, shimmering, spreading-- it laps at her riding boots, licking up her shins. The wharf beneath her is mahogany, rich like the stained insides of a wine barrel. It creaks.

Moira looks out to the right, to the rocks, to Angela. Tries to; her white waistcoat is too tight, and soaked through. Heavy. Too heavy to breathe beneath.

 _Angela!_ she tries to yell, but bubbles float from her mouth, iridescent and shiny. They pop; blood sprays against her face. The same colour as her hair. Her eye.  
  
_Angela!_  
  
But that isn’t her name. Just the one she chose.

Moira screams, and the wharf creaks and cracks, til it crumples.

~

Angela looks down her tail. She looks up at Moira. “How many of my people did you kill?”

Moira’s mouth goes tacky. She swallows quietly, and she tells her honestly, because that’s all she has these days, and she can’t lose the truth. “I’ve never killed a mermaid.”

Angela goes to surge forwards but there’s no water to push against, nowhere for her to drag and drown Moira, so she grips the sheets in her white-knuckled fingers and seethes, instead. “You’re lying. I know who you are. You were always there, on the ships, dressed in white and red.”

“But I never took a life. Not one of yours.” All of a sudden, Moira feels very very tired, and very empty. She slumps back into a chair behind her. “That was never my job.”

“But you never stopped it happening, counters Angela, barely louder than a whisper. Her hands are shaking.

Moira corrects her. “I did.” She sniffs, and it’s easy to lose her vision to the foggy kitchen window. The green mountains are glistening with the settled fog. If she closes her eyes, she can hear the ocean breaking against the rocks. “I put an end to it all. But much too late.”

“Then why are we still being attacked?”

Moira opens her eyes, and finds them locked to Angela’s tail. Without trying, she can remember the wound, the faded, torn scales, her flesh moments from sepsis. “I suppose, I didn’t try hard enough. I may as well have doomed your people.”

Tears turn Angela’s pretty eyes shiny, but they don’t break. “That’s no way to live: in acceptance.”

She sounds like she’s talking to herself.

She sounds like she’s angry, but not at Moira.

Then Moira looks at her, hyper-focused, finger tapping her knee bullet-quick, as a stupid little thought starts to tickle the back of her brain. “Which tribe were you from?”

Angela spits, scoffs. Her hair is still curled from the salt water, or perhaps that’s simply her genes. Either way it hangs in her face. Moira still feels cold when she replies, without needing to see her eyes.

Because she tells her, “all of them. They were all mine.”

A thought rolls into a different one, in a dark part of Moira’s mind, and then it makes a monster, and Moira realises just what Angela is.

“Now every single one is gone. Because of you.”  

~

The midday sun tries feebly to fight through the clouds still hanging in the sky from last night, but all that it offers is a dull warmth against Moira’s back as she works. The heat makes her sweat, nevertheless, and all the places where her white shirt should hang do the opposite and stick to her skin, uncomfortable and itchy. Her hair is loose around her ears and eyes, and as she hoists the wood in her arms she flicks it back, though as she makes her way to the porch it only falls back in place, shifted by her heavy steps.

Down on the beach Angela’s wheelchair waits lonely, just at the edge of the sand and the grass.

She’s been gone for an hour now, but Moira isn’t worried. The first time she was, neither of them entirely trusting the other; but Angela had come back. And she hadn’t tipped off any of the Citadel’s fleet. And Moira was safe.

Still is, Moira reminds herself, stacking the logs. And now, so is Angela.

They have enough wood to last the winter if they skimp. This time of the year the merchants always pass through, crossing from one side of the island to the other with their carts stocked and draught horses healthy, and a few know to stop where the road breaks off. One will take it down to the house in exchange for feed and water, and when Wilhelm came, a handful of days ago, Moira made sure Angela kept to the water, and her chair hidden by the rocks.

Thin as she is Moira’s never suffered the cold, her fair skin and northern sensibilities much more acclimated towards it than the heat. She can’t imagine Angela will notice the winter too much, either, what with how she freely enjoys the bitter water this late in autumn.  

Besides, if she were cold, all Angela would have to do is offer one side of the bed--

Moira nearly knocks the entire wood stack over. Irritated she stands, marching back to the side of the house and stuffing more wood in her arms.

These kinds of thoughts aren’t unwarranted, she reminds herself steadily, breathing slowly: it’s a byproduct of suddenly being in company after all these months of being alone. Cohabiting a space so intimate as the tiny house would lead anyone’s mind to whisper such intrusive things. A Freudian slip. Only that would imply… Moira doesn’t want to think about what that implies.

It’s partly Winston’s fault, she decides, because he was teasing her yesterday. And like a cold shower, Moira remembers Ana, and Fareeha, and just how much gold she mightn’t have this coming winter.

She looks out at the sea, the wheelchair. She never had any intention of asking for Angela’s help. Moira left that part of her life at the Citadel, for good reason.

After all, it took over a month for Angela to trust her, and she doesn’t want to shatter that with one little question. Her reputation as the Doctor, the Surgeon, the Waistcoat, it precedes her in the worst of ways, and Moira’s sure she has a thousand names to the merfolk. If there are even any other than Angela left to speak it.

When Moira has dampened her loud mind and moved the wood to undercover, she leans on the banister and rolls a cigarette. When she finishes it, and tosses the stub into the compost, and Angela still hasn’t surfaced, she rubs her sore eyes behind her glasses and tells herself the anxiety is normal. She distracts herself, watching the hens scratch around and bury themselves in the dirt, counting the whorls in the banister. The solar panelling Winston gave her leans next to her, and Moira remembers her promise.

And that’s why she follows the path down to the beach, whispering through the grass and crunching in the sand. Then her boots find the edge of the wharf, and just as she goes to step up onto it, she hears a noise; soft and low, and to the average ear unmistakable as a slight of the wind. And maybe it’s the coiling anxiety that convinces her not to step back from the wharf, and turn around and wait at the house. Maybe it’s because for the last month every dream has been set here, in the black rocks with a white body torn in two and blood, an ocean’s worth of it.

But she doesn’t ignore it. Moira’s boots sink in the wet sand, the foamy bubbles clinging to the leather. She swallows against the tightness in her throat, and pushes her glasses up her long nose, and when she sidles up behind one of the larger rocks, she crouches, waits.

And it’s there again, that strange noise. A whimper, almost, though not as broken and flayed as the one Moira heard when she first brought Angela back to the house. And she doesn’t know why she hides, why she listens, maybe it’s so she doesn’t break that trust she values so much; but Moira presses herself to the side of the rock, leaning slightly around its curve, and she squints.

It’s Angela, undoubtedly, lying on her back in the water with her hair curling around her, bobbing in the gentle waves. Her eyes are closed, her lips pink and wet and parted, and Moira never knew her nose was so delicate, or her cheekbones so high til now, and seeing her at this angle. Her head is tilted back.

She has one hand against her side. She’s panting.

Moira’s eyes widen, and she almost chokes on her tongue, when she finds Angela’s other hand beneath the waves and just below the thick scar, her fingers working herself languidly. Moira’s breath comes heavy. She can’t see too clearly through the water, and without her glasses, but it looks as though Angela’s coaxing something out of herself; a short, tentacle-like thing, as white as the scales of her belly.

And Angela moans quietly, her gills fluttering, a peachy flush creeping down her neck and turning her skin blotchy. When she extracts herself she shudders, and Moira can’t help the way she stares. She can’t pull herself back around the rock, or her eyes from Angela’s body, or stop the flush colouring her cheeks or ignore the way her chest aches.  
  
                              

She should turn around. She should turn around and go back to the house.

Angela holds herself in a loose grip and works her wrist, a slow movement that leaves her shaking. Moira’s curious; she never studied the creatures’ reproductive habits, finding for some reason that that was the one thing she wouldn’t do. She’d never invade their sexual autonomy, even in death.

Then what is she doing now?

Moira swallows and forces herself to sit back on the other side of the rock. It’s cool when she presses her cheek to it, and the water laps at her fingers where her palms are down by her sides. It’s grounding. Moira shuts her eyes, and sucks a quiet, deep breath; lets the salt purify her and weigh in her lungs.

And she goes to leave. She has to. That’s the right thing to do. That’s what any normal person would do.

Until Angela utters one soft, damning little thing. It’s carried on the wind and the waves, and so quiet she barely hears it, but she does; unmistakable. Unmaskable. 

“Moira--” 

Moira scrunches her eyes shut and pushes off from the rock, and hopes the ocean drowns out the sound of her footfalls. 

~

Moira’s leaning against the banister with her fifth cigarette for the evening between her knuckles when Angela shows herself, waving down in her chair at the edge of the sand. For a brief, wicked moment Moira considers ignoring her, and turning back into the house, but her heart hurts at the thought, and she banishes it as quick as it came. She offers a weak wave back, more a hand raise than anything, and stubs out the remaining half of her cigarette, pretending it’s finished.

Behind the house and the mountains and her the sun is setting, sinking into the western side of the island and painting it in stripes of orange and red. It’s warm, or at least Moira is, and she has the sleeves of her button up rolled to the elbow, and the hem tucked into her britches as if its spring. The sunlight makes her hair shine a brilliant copper, and she tugs it childishly with her nervous hands.

“Get ahold of yourself,” she hisses, her boots dragging in the dirt path. All afternoon she’s been plagued, every time she shuts her eyes she sees Angela, shrouded in gold, the ocean foam like a thousand little gems clinging to her skin.

Her tongue like honey, her words so sweet.

Whenever Moira isn’t drowning out her mind with her own selfish thoughts, she hears her voice, she hears her own name being said in a way it hasn’t been in a very long time.

Angela’s already pulled herself into her chair and dusted her tail of sand by the time Moira meets her at the edge of the path, and she’s fixing the sweater to fit comfortably over her. Moira pulls her face into a neat smile, ducks her head.

“How was your swim?” Her boot finds the break and kicks it up, and she has to stoop a little to reach the handles. “Did you catch a lot?”

Her voice is surprisingly even. Maybe it’s all her years of lying finally doing her some good.

But Angela doesn’t notice regardless. “Just a few of the bigger fish, they’re in the pool.” Her hair has mostly dried and sweeps over her shoulders in thick, sea-kissed curls. She smiles to herself as she plaits it.

They don’t speak as Moira pushes her up the hill to the house, and all the while she tries to keep her eyes up, and off Angela’s tail, and the little nook beneath the scar. They don’t speak, leaving Moira trapped in her thoughts. 

Rationalism tells her that they’re simply two people, haunted by their past and finding solace in each other’s company. That it’s normal. That this happens, it has before. Once.

And look at how that turned out?

Moira purses her chapped lips, and shoulders into the house to find her tool box. The fantasy in Moira shirks her reasonings, trying to embrace something much more crazy, much less plausible in her, but she manages to quell it when she pushes back out onto the verandah, and picks up the solar panel.

But when she looks back Angela is smiling, her long fingers pulling and twisting her hair, and her lashes are so long they almost brush her cheeks. She doesn’t notice her stealing another moment, another look, and Moira feels something lurch inside her.

It feels like that second after you trip, and just before you start to fall. 

~

“Don’t you want to know why?” mutters Countess Lacroix in the clinical silence, her voice a broken thing, her lips peeling and blue. She lays flat in a bed in the infirmary, in the private wing, alone. “Aren’t you curious?”

It’s the most she’s ever spoken to Moira. All the same it’s sickening, hearing her like this. She sounds bitter. She sounds resentful. She sounds like she hasn’t got anything left to lose. Moira lets her eyes flick up; wrong move. Amelie’s golden stare is boring into her, hard and heavy and damning.

“I’m sure the entire city is talking about it by now.”

They weren’t. Jack made sure of that. But Moira doesn’t say anything, doesn’t engage. It isn’t the first time she’s checked Amelie’s progress, after all. 

It’s been worse, anyway. At least this time it’s just her, without Gabe’s shadow in the corner or Gerard falling asleep against his fist, in the chair by her bed. Moira can take it, like water off a duck’s back; Amelie’s goading doesn’t affect her like it does the others. She's used to this kind of treatment, no matter the social rank.

And maybe that’s why Amelie keeps talking, because she knows Moira doesn’t care or in the least, acts as though she doesn’t. Maybe she thinks she has a confidant in Moira, for whatever reason. Moira knows people whisper things about her in the streets, trying to determine what sort of a freak she must be to have such a preoccupation with the merfolk, and to want to conduct all her intricate, intrusive studies. At first it bothered her, simply because the citizens would give her a wide berth and a sly eye whenever she walked passed. It stopped bothering her quick enough, when she started making progress.

Progress. Moira snorts, and eyes Amelie’s blue fingertips. She scratches something down on her pad. 

“I fell in love, doctor,” Amelie says into the silence, her voice shrill and sharp. “I think Gabe took her away.” 

And perhaps Amelie thinks Moira can do something about it, and that’s why she tells her. It’s her confession, to the one person who might help.

“She called herself Lena. We were going to go south. She was so different from the others...”

Moira pauses, but she doesn’t look up. She stares at her pad, eyes wide, mind whirring. She doesn’t know what to say.

So she tells Amelie, ignoring the confession, and ignoring what it means, “get some rest. I’ll be back in a half hour for your bloods.”

~

She shows her where the cables from the panel to the house connect and how they tighten. Angela’s chair creaks when she leans forwards to get a better view.

(Water, rippling and trickling, rushing between rocks, sluicing down Angela’s chest)

She lets Angela fix one, her long fingers elegant against the metal.  
  
(Gripping herself beneath the water, encircling, working, Angela panting)

“There, that should be it. We’ll have to give it a few days for it to kick in.”

(“ _Moira_ \--”)

“The house is old, but it has ports here and-- over here, and the plugs on these panels are universal.” Moira doesn’t look at her, hopes Angela can’t see the heat on her neck. “I survived last winter without electricity, but I won’t say it doesn’t make things easier.” 

“I never even knew this kind of technology existed,” Angela says softly, and she almost sounds disappointed. Her eyes are distant, flicking over the intricacies of the solar panel and craning her head. “We always thought we were the advanced kind, but perhaps we should give you humans more credit.”

Moira swallows against the lump in her throat. She doesn’t know whether she should feel chuffed or sad, or something else entirely, so she shakes it away and climbs down off the awning, her boots landing firmly on the porch. “We adapt to all kinds of living scenarios. But we need the tech for that.”

“That’s where you’re weak.”

Moira sniffs, and a twitch of irritation flexes in her bottom lip. “Hardly. It’s just the way humans are.”

 _Perhaps she didn’t enjoy her time in the pools,_ a snake-like voice hisses in her head, though that only makes Moira more annoyed, even if it shouldn’t.

Angela must sense something in her because she doesn’t challenge her, and the argument ends quietly. Moira distracts herself by shaking one of the beams overhead, and when the solar panel doesn’t crash down on them she’s content with her efforts. The last dregs of sunlight are warm on her bared neck, a fleeting moment of comfort before she turns into the house and leaves the door open for Angela behind her.

She shouldn’t sulk like this, childish and sullen. It’s not Angela’s fault, and it’s not the clash of cultures turning her sour. 

Mad at herself, Moira pulls down a saucepan from the overhead hang, slamming cans down on the counter.

~

The rain is heavy tonight, and sounds like bullets against the tin roof. The windows whine and rattle in their frames, piercing like the cry of a wounded animal. Eery. It reminds her of the winter in her homeland, where the mountains climb and climb and the rivers fracture the countryside. It’s cold as her homeland, too, but the water in the bathtub covers just enough of her to keep her skin warm, and her bones from going stiff.   

The rain is loud. It’s loud enough to cover her tight breaths, the way the hot water splashes gentle and steady where her hand is moving beneath the surface.

She doesn’t do this often, perhaps once a week, or a fortnight, when her biology unbalances itself and she finds herself stressed, or lonely. She holds onto the flimsy, fleeting memories of years ago, of past acquaintances and past cold, wet nights. They’re so distant now she doesn’t remember names or faces, just bodies, just heat.

It’s enough. Moira bites her lip hard enough to flush, her right hand working in tight little circles, her long fingers either side of her clit. She keeps her left hand gripping the edge of the tub, knuckles white and fingers curled. She shuts her eyes, and little stars burst in the darkness.

She doesn’t let herself make sounds -- never has, really, even when in the company of lovers -- but one slips out, the most delicate noise she’s made in weeks. Perhaps she’s that lonely, or that sick, but it makes something swell in her chest, turns her stomach tight.

It doesn’t take much. It doesn’t, not now she’s alone like this, and the memories behind her eyes flicker like a picture book. She thinks of long hair in her fists for her to pull and guide, full lips, thinks of rib cages and hips and breasts.

Small, with pale nipples, hidden behind a curtain of white hair.

Moira pants hard. Comes harder. Her breath puffs in front of her, and is lost to the steam from the bath. It’s still raining hard, and thunder grumbles somewhere on the other side of the mountains. She flexes her wrist, and lets it dangle over the side of the porcelain.

When she opens her eyes she throws a look behind her shoulder, to where she knows Angela is curled and sleeping in her bed.  It’s been two weeks of stifled conversations and misunderstandings, and long enough for Moira to overlook how hard her chairs are in comparison to her mattress. 

There’s a little twinge in her neck at the strange angle, but it’s easy enough to ignore. The hair in her face is a minor nuisance but she sweeps it back, looks again.

Two glowing blue eyes bore down at her, wide and unblinking and probing, and Moira feels sick. The moment she shares with Angela is too long and plenty awkward and Moira culls it by turning back around and sniffing. She pushes up from the tub, impossibly tall in the tiny house, and doesn’t look back at her -- even though she can feel Angela’s heated gaze --  as she dresses and combs her hair, and eventually, pulls out a chair at the table to fall into and sleep.

  
It’s been two hard weeks since Angela washed up on the rocks, and she hasn’t said much of anything. They have boundaries. Or they did. Moira thumbs the filter on her cigarette as she inspects the damage to the chicken coup, dully empty and surprisingly placid, and trying to keep last night far from her mind.

She’s embarrassed, she realises, and that’s a feeling she left a long time ago at the Citadel. She didn’t meet Angela’s eyes at breakfast, couldn’t after how intense they were last night. Moira pushes the one of the chicken carcasses with the toe of her boot, and exhales slowly. Perhaps Angela is none the wiser, and knows little of human customs and sexuality, like she barely knows anything of that of the merfolk. But perhaps that’s just wishful thinking.

The surviving hens squawk and squabble where Moira has them locked in the coup, and sticking her cigarette in her mouth Moira rolls up her sleeves and cleans the carnage, burying the remains a few metres behind the house and deep enough that they shouldn’t lure more foxes. In the rickety shed at the back of the field there’s a roll of wire coiled and leaning against one of the walls, and Moira grabs it under her arm and takes her secateurs and goes to turn back out, grimacing when she thinks about how many quarts she has and how much a hen goes for.

But then something catches her eye, in the corner, folded away and slim. A large steel wheel takes up a grand portion of its side, but it only takes Moira second to identify it: it’s a wheelchair, and upon closer inspection it’s still in a rather healthy condition. Moira hasn’t seen a wheelchair since she was a fellow, when the world was dawning on the age of solar power.

Thick with grime and coated in a hefty layer of cobwebs, Moira drops her wire and kicks the chair open. One of the wheels has rusted out, but she’s sure she has some sanding paper somewhere back here, and with a little motor oil from her bike it should be repairable. The leather seat has a tear in it, but it’s easily stitchable.

A strange kind of glow swells on the inside of her ribs, and she rolls the chair forward, and backwards, testing. It squeaks. That’s hardly an issue.

When she pushes it into the house, Angela stares at her, and it, a confused frown pinching her brow. She watches from the bed as Moira moves the small dining table and the few chairs to the side of the room, and even though it makes her cheeks twinge Moira turns back to her and grins.

When their eyes meet, Angela blushes and hastily looks downwards. Moira’s smile twitches. She perseveres.

“I found this,” she says, and her voice sounds alien to her. “It’s a wheelchair. You’ll be able to get around the house without my help." 

Angela frowns at it, obviously trying to decide if the tears and the rust are cosmetic features and trying to pretend like she understands it. Moira doesn’t call her out, just wheels it over to her.

Angela tilts her head. “Can I go outside?”

The initial panic makes Moira’s heart jump, but they’re far from town, and no one aside from Wilhelm knows she’s here. There’s something else in her chest too, strange and alien, that almost makes her tongue curl around the word _no._ No, because you’ll leave me.

“Of course,” Moira says quickly instead, sick with herself. “But I’ll need to level the pathway more, so you can make it down to the ocean.”

Angela does something strange. She laughs, a gurgling sound, airy in her gills. “Why would I want to do that?”

“Well, I assume you’ll want to return one day. Or sometimes.” Moira licks her lips. “Your tail is almost fully healed. There’s no issue.”

“Oh?” Angela’s tail curls against the stone floor, and she wraps her long arms around her chest. She isn’t cold though, or else she’d put on one of the many shirts Moira’s offered her, despite her reluctance to adopt such a _human_ custom. “You’re wrong.”

This is the most Angela’s spoken to her in one conversation. Moira pretends she isn’t curious. “Why am I wrong?” 

She pulls her hair over her, and leans against the headframe. “I can never go back to the ocean, to live, Moira. I did something bad.”

So did Moira. Tentatively, nonchalantly, ignoring the fact that she’s keenly aware of every little sound and creak and shift in the house, Moira meanders across the room. She sits at the very end of the bed, far enough from Angela that she doesn’t startle her, but her fingers are barely a foot from the side of Angela’s slick tail.

“What did you do?”

 “It’s more--” Angela winces. She stares at the floor, and says, so quiet and soft, “It’s more what I didn’t do, Moira.”

“Then what didn’t you do?”

Her eyes are such a pretty blue, even when they’re sad. This close Moira can see all the tiny scratches in her scales, the cross-hatching and flecks of misplaced colours, bleeding and merging together. Her fins lay limpid at her sides. “I didn’t stop Gabriel, either. I didn’t even try, til it was too late.”

It’s a hefty revelation. Moira knows what it means, and somehow it makes her feel even worse than she ever could, and even more ashamed. But still she asks --  or more says -- quietly, as though that will lessen the blow, remembering her revelation from two weeks ago, “you were their leader, weren’t you?”

“I was never a leader,” Angela laughs, breathy and empty. “I hid. When my kind went missing, when they told me what the humans of the mainland were doing to them, when they begged me to migrate, I hid.” 

“Why?”

“Why did you start dissecting us?”

Moira shrugs. Her voice stays gentle. “What do you do to anything you don’t understand?”

Something loosens along Angela’s shoulders. She exhales, slow and deep. “In life, there are hunters and there are prey. I had always thought that we were the hunters. When that changed, I acquiesced.

“I have known humans for hundreds of years,” Angela’s voice is firm, shaking, and she looks Moira in the eye. “I have seen them build their cities and watch them crumble and kill. I see what you do to each other, your own kin. How was I supposed to stop you from tearing apart something you had no likeness to? No empathy for?”

Moira’s eyes flick over her face. “It wasn’t your fault. It was never your fault.”

How can she say that when she doesn’t even know Angela? She chides herself for being so lofty and impractical, but it still feels like the right thing to say. She doesn’t regret it. 

“Well, it doesn’t matter now, does it?” When Angela looks at her she isn’t mad, or bitter, or sad. Just quiet. It’s contentment, Moira realises. Instead of cragged, broken rock she’s smooth and whittled down, having suffered the oceans’ break too many a time. Instead of holding her anger, or a grudge to Moira, she lets it drift away. Lets herself heal. “You’d best show me how this thing works.” 

~

“We might be able to get a refrigerator, once the panel warms up ,” Moira tells her around a forkful of pumpkin, her eyes downcast at the plate, “wouldn’t that be lovely? We could keep more food.”

“Yes, but how would we get it back?” Angela rebuffs, “We’ll need one of those-- the motorcycle, with the roof.” She waves her hand above her head. It’s stupidly adorable. Moira scrapes her plate with her knife, shifts in her seat. 

“A solar-car.” Unfortunately, her gaze flicks to her case, nestled on the shelf. Her breath twists. “They’re too expensive, to buy and to run.”

Angela shrugs. And then she says, airy, as though it’s a thought she forgot once and only remembered having now, “you never told me how you make money, exactly.” 

“I help sick people in the town.” It’s not a lie. Moira shifts in her seat. “Sometimes they don’t want to see the local apothecary or shrink. Say a patient wanted treated an unbecoming wart, or a sexually transmitted disease caught from an affair. If they went to their doctor the gossip would hit the streets before they even had their cure.” 

“So you keep their secrets.”

Moira nods. “Plus,” she adds, “I trained at the best university on the mainland: Oasis. It’s safe to say this little town is rather outdated in its methods in comparison.”

 _I heard mermaid blood is all the rage,_ says a little voice at the back of her head that sounds disturbingly like Angela.

But she only hums, and eats her dinner, and doesn’t bring up her past. Til a frown pinches her brow, and she asks Moira another question. “And your friend, Winston, is he sick, too? He helps us a lot.”

When did _you_ turn to _us_?

Moira swallows, and takes a healthy sip of her drink, and by the time she’s ran out of things to procrastinate with she decides to just tell Angela the truth.

In part.

“I help his friend. Her mother is very sick.” Moira rubs her thumb through the wet condensing on the side of her glass, and when she shuts her eyes she can feel Ana’s brittle bones, her loose skin. “Her mother is dying.”

Angela’s mouth is a thin line. “You can’t stave off death entirely. You can only prolong it, extend the pain.”

Moira laughs, an empty thing, and she pushes her glasses out of her eyes so she can rub her hands over her face. She can feel the ripples of her scarring on her right hand against her cheek, the bumps and waves and grooves. The crevasses and tears. “I found a way,” she says behind her palms.

“Pardon? I didn’t hear that.”

Moira shakes her head, and by the time her hands make it back to the table they’re balled in white-knuckled fists, her nails carving half-moons into the soft of her palm. “I found a way. Hyper cell-regeneration. I was able to isolate the catalyst in cells and harness it to work with the host, which could be any kind of organism, regardless of species, no matter the origin of the cell.”

She shouldn’t be telling her this. Moira should just shut her mouth, and tell Angela to forget it, and she won’t lose this thing they have. Angela will go to sleep. Angela will stay.

Moira will lose her if she doesn’t stop talking.

But maybe it’s the whiskey. Maybe, if the way Angela was whispering for her out by the rocks is any indicator, she won’t leave.

“You can alleviate any illness. You can bring people back from the brink.” She remembers Lacroix, her lungs ache. “With the right amount of mermaid blood. If you inject too much, you’ll wish you died instead.”

She remembers Amelie Lacroix. 

She remembers Gabe.

Moira sucks a breath through her teeth, and that wretched part of herself tears itself open to let the cold in.

And Angela, with her eyes like crystals, reaches across the table and takes her right hand in both of hers.

And she says, “tell me about them,” with her thumb brushing the underside of her thin, purple wrist. “Tell me about everything you did.”

And Moira stares at her like she isn’t real, and starts from the beginning. 

~

Blood. 

An ocean’s worth of it.

Hot, shimmering, stinking of iron and warmed steel. It laps at her boots, over the little pebbles and broken shells scattered through the white sand. It sluices over the leather, trickles between the valleys between the sea’s debris. It recedes.

It recedes, and suddenly Moira can breathe through the all ocean foam clogging her throat.

And when Moira wakes up she isn’t gasping, or drowning in her own sweat, and she’s safe on her bedroll and staring at the wood beams overhead. For the first time the dream fades rather than hanging on her shoulders. Moira sighs, cards her fingers through her tousled hair.

And she has a brief moment of fleeting peace before a familiar stab of pain pulses low in her belly. She shifts, and grimaces when she moves her thighs.

“Fuck.”

Pushing herself up on her elbows Moira kicks the blanket back to inspect the damage, but the moonlight is dim through the condensation on the windows. Still she can make out a dark patch on the inner side of her britches, and deciding she doesn’t need to see the rest Moira gets up and pads to the kitchen, sourcing a bottle of ibuprofen and a tin of tea to brew. Her cloths are in the bottom draw, tucked away in a little box. She grimaces when she unfurls them.

When she settles back at the table, that’s when the pain kicks in. Moira finds herself slumping down onto her arms and gritting her teeth against the coiling pain, the fire from the stove warming her back and minutely helping. She doesn’t know what time it is, but she gauges it’s only a few hours before dawn, and she doesn’t know how long she sits like that, so Moira shuts her eyes, waits it out.

Til a gentle voice calls her from the bed, and she grunts in response. 

“What’s wrong?” Angela asks sleepily. Moira can hear the rustling of bedsheets, the squeak of the chair being pulled to the bed. Moira waves her off. 

“It’ll pass; go back to sleep.”

The chair creaks, regardless, and Angela grunts as she transfers herself. Then she’s wheeling to Moira’s side, and her hands are warm and soft against Moira’s clammy forehead. “You don’t have a fever, are you sick?”

A flare of irritation almost controls her tongue when another cramp hits, but Moira breathes steadily, shakes Angela off. “No. I said it’ll pass.”

“Can I help?”

Oh, fuck. When Moira looks at her something dark coils in her belly, makes her heart swell and her mind envision Angela tied down to a bed, beneath her. Her eyes are wide with worry, with _care,_ and no one has ever cared for Moira.

“It’s to do with human reproduction,” Moira finds herself saying. “Nothing to vex yourself over. The pain should go away within a few days.”

“I can make it go away now,” Angela murmurs, and Moira blinks dumbly, her mouth parting. Angela pulls her hair over her shoulder, flicks her pied tail, and has she always looked so sexy doing such mundane things?  
  
No, Moira thinks, panicking, no, she isn’t-- this isn’t-- 

“Here,” Angela says, and she reaches forward to untuck Moira’s shirt from her britches. “The pain is here, right?”

Moira splutters dumbly, her chair dragging against the stone floor when she pushes away. “What- wait, _wait,_ ” she manages, standing up and holding Angela off. “What are you doing?” 

“Just relax,” Angela soothes, and her hands move beneath her button up, and oh, god, Moira hasn’t been touched like this in years, and she shakes as she grips the back of the chair. She bites her lip, and screws her eyes shut, and holds her breath--

And she releases when Angela only presses her hands against the flat of her belly and no further. The muscles of her abdomen flex and twitch beneath Angela’s palms, but otherwise Moira calms herself down, watching as Angela glances up at her, then shuts her eyes.

Her hands don’t glow. Magic doesn’t stream shimmering and shiny from her fingers. But Moira feels it; Moira feels her stomach unknot itself and her cramps abate, and just as soon as she regulated her breathing she’s gasping and shaking. 

“What-” she starts, but a soft moan takes over, when she feels her lower back lose its tension.

“We don’t have technology like you do. Of course, there are roots and corals you can consume to help pain, to cure this and that, but otherwise we had to evolve to heal ourselves.” Angela’s fingers fan out, and she traces little patterns into Moira’s skin, her fingers waving like seaweed in a gentle current. “Some of us evolved that we could heal others. It’s helpful, to say the least. 

“Isn’t that laughable?” she continues, but she doesn’t sound bitter. “Had you only befriended us, we could have given you everything you’d ever need, without having to be so destructive.”

“That’s humans for you,” Moira gasps, and if Angela doesn’t get her hands off of her she’s going to do something stupid. “We’re horrible, and selfish, and abusive.” 

She only catches it because Moira can’t stop herself from looking down, but she’s glad she does: because there’s a tiny smirk tugging Angela’s mouth, before she leans forward and presses her lips to Moira’s pale skin. When she whispers, her breath is hot, and Moira trembles. “Not all of you.”

~

The days get shorter, the nights colder. The food dwindles, and before Moira realises solstice comes, three weeks later. She can’t afford to build a pyre outdoors, even if the weather would permit it, so she stocks the fire beneath the stove and throws in a few sprigs of thyme from her window box, and smiles when Angela tosses a pinch of her lavender bath salts. She makes them each a cup of tea with brown sugar and cinnamon, and together they sit at the table and watch the rain drizzle through the window. Droplets sluice down the glass and catch the moonlight, glowing strong around the brims of the heavy clouds. The steam from the mug fogs Moira’s spectacles. Angela laughs, pretty and light and crystaline.

The next day Moira tills the vegetable patch and throws corn for the chickens, with Angela watching from the verandah, wrapped in Moira’s red sweater. Moira catches her looking out at the ocean, and there’s a sadness etched into her face and hanging in her eyes. A happy kind of misery, of longing, of complacency. 

When she catches Moira it changes, like it always does.

In the bottom draw in the kitchen Moira keeps satchels of different seeds, and one evening she explains what each flower looks like when its grown and when to plant them to Angela, who in turn tells her a brief entirety of underwater botany. Moira listens attentively, never drowsy, and with her words Angela paints sunsets beneath the sea, she describes colours Moira’s never experienced. Her palms grip her glass of whiskey, the bottle low on the counter, and Moira asks Angela what she misses most.

“The reefs,” Angela admits, eyes misty. “I miss sleeping in a bed of coral, and feeling the sun on my face through the water.”

Then Moira will give her a garden, she decides afterwards. Come spring there won’t be a corner of their croft that isn’t fenced with sunflowers, not a window on the house that isn’t holding bunches of peonies and bundles of lavender.

She finds herself thinking these kinds of things often, Moira realises that night, beneath her blankets and watching Angela sleep from her bedroll. Perhaps it should worry her more. Perhaps it should scare her. But it does neither of those things, and she decides she doesn’t need to address it internally.

She pulls her blankets tight and shifts, and the fire low on the hearth catches the brass buckles of her case on the shelf. And just like that, reality dawns.

She could guarantee Ana Amari five more months of life. Could Fareeha even call what Moira was giving her life? If anything Moira can only give her pain, and suffering, and stasis.

It’s another week til she’s due to visit, like death and his scythe at Fareeha’s little brick-red door. Maybe Fareeha knows what she's asking of Moira is wrong, but can’t get past her own selfishness. It’s not as though Moira would condemn her for that.

She rolls over. She isn’t going to sleep like this, not with her mind dropping back into the shadows at its edge. Winston's question looms. She fantasises about not giving Angela a choice. And then the fantasies turn to memories, and dredged up is that very first time she took a mermaid to her laboratory. What if Angela was the very first mermaid she strapped to her examination table and cut open, only to watch the skin stitch itself back together? What if Moira’s breath was stolen by those gemstone eyes, her heart gripped by her pretty voice begging her to stop and her lithe body writhing in anger and pain beneath her and her scalpel?

Moira shudders. She pulls her hair and grinds her teeth together and screams at her mind to silence itself.

She’s sick.

She was sick to ever do what Gabe asked of her.

There’s no way she could ever ask Angela for her blood and live with herself.

The blankets constrict her, and she curls in on herself. She bites her knuckles, and forces her eyes shut until she doesn’t see Angela’s limp body anymore, only blackness. No stars, just nothing. The way that’s easy, the way it always has been.

~

She doesn’t have a week to decide how she’s going to tell Fareeha she’s running out of blood. She doesn’t even have a night.

Somewhere between the second and third bang of a fist against the weak wood of the front door Moira’s eyes snap open, and before she even takes a breath she’s slinking into the kitchen and winding her fingers around her pistol.

There’s only three bullets, but that doesn’t worry her. Moira exhales slowly, and glances over at Angela, who’s pressed against the wall in the bed with her eyes wide with worry. She’s illuminated by the yellow of two headlights out the window, her rapid breaths silenced beneath the rumbling of a sol-car’s engine. Moira holds up a hand, reaches out to her, then she whirls around and uses it cup the bottom of the pistol as the door swings inward. She braces for the pistol’s kickback.

It never comes.

“Moira!” Winston squeaks, ducking out of the doorway and hiding out of her sight. “Put that down!”

“Oh my God,” Moira sighs in her mothertongue, crumpling into the closest chair and shaking as her adrenaline leaves her body. “What the _fuck,_ Winston?"

“I’m sorry-- I know you don’t take visitors!” He steps back into sight, his hands held up placatingly. “I only came because it’s urgent.”

When he steps into he house he closes the door behind him, and Moira loosely gestures for him to take a seat, only so she can stand and go and fill the kettle. “Did anyone see you?”

“No, it’s two in the morning. Or it was when I left.”

Angela hasn’t moved from where she’s pressed to the wall, and Moira clicks her tongue and throws Winston a look before going to kneel in front of her. “It’s okay,” she says gently, attempting a smile and trying to ignore how Winston must be watching them. “This is my friend from the town, you remember. He won’t hurt you.” 

But Moira will.

She reaches for Angela’s hand, rubs her thumb against her pale knuckles. “Come on. I’ll make us all some tea.”

“I’m afraid we mightn’t have time,” Winston says severely, and perhaps it’s only the lighting but he looks more tired than Moira’s ever seen him. For the first time in almost a month her throat grows tight, and she hopes Angela can’t feel her shaking. 

She knew the moment she saw Winston why he was here.

“It’s Ana, isn’t it?”

“She’s declining, Moira.” He sounds so broken, and as he sits in the chair his shoulders sag and he pushes his hands up behind his glasses, perhaps to hold his tears in. His voice is muffled. “I think it’s time. I think it’s her time.” 

Moira stands and helps Angela into her chair. Then she pulls her coat around her, fastening the buttons. She pulls her riding gloves on, and slings her goggles around her neck. “If you really thought that, you wouldn’t be here, Winston.”

It’s cold, callous, clean. Just like her. Just like she has to be, against the gaping hole against her chest. She lives with it every day, is able to shape her life to have as little interaction with it as possible. It’s draining. And she doesn’t want that for her only friend. 

“Let’s go see her,” she says quietly, taking his great hands and rubbing her thumbs over his hairy knuckles. “When did she start to get worse?”

“On Sunday. I didn’t think it was so bad. Fareeha told me it was only a headcold, but then she let me in to see her, Moira, and she--”

“I know.” She shuts her eyes, looses a breath, itches for a cigarette. “I know.”

There is always something lost to something gain, to keep balance in the universe. That’s just life.

But there is a lot to be gained from mermaid blood, even if you keep the doses small. “We can make it to town before dawn.” She steps back, and Angela wheels in to replace her. “I have to pack. This is Angela. I told her about you.”

Winston tries a fleeting smile, and it’s only a fraction of the warmth that always spills from his heart but it comforts Moira all the same. As she trudges out the door to start the bike, she sees Angela reach for his hands and shut her eyes. 

The grass crunches beneath her boots and her breaths frost in front of her. She pulls back the sheet off the bike and kicks the ignition a few time before the engine gurgles to life and the dash lights up, one little orange dial at a time. She wriggles the sidecar, and satisfied that it’s secure hunches back inside. Angela is talking to Winston softly, too softly for Moira to hear, but the sight is tender to her heart. 

She loads the sidecar with blankets and a bag of clothes for herself, as well as her medical case, and the one holding the five lasting vials of blood. Winston watches her take it, over Angela’s shoulder, and Moira ignores the confusion on his face.

“Alright,” Moira says, back in the house and not fifteen minutes since Winston arrived. She flicks the safety back on her gun, and hides it in the cupboard closest to the door. “We’re about ready to go. Angela, I should only be gone a few days.”

“Wait,” Angela starts, pulling away from Winston and following Moira as she walks back out the door. “I’m not coming with you?”

“It isn’t safe. If anyone sees you, realises what you are, you’ll be strung up and sold for parts.”

“You said I could come next time.” Angela sounds angry, but Moira can’t bare to look back at her to find out. “You promised.”

“It isn’t safe,” Moira repeats, quietly, through her teeth.

Winston’s frowning at her now, pulling his scarf tight and standing by his tiny car. Clearly he doesn’t understand, but Moira thanks him for his silence, for not outing her.

 _I thought you told her?_ she can hear him asking. Moira shuts her eyes, and pats the cigarette tin in her coat pocket.

“I know you aren’t scared I’ll be killed,” Angela continues, rolling herself down the ramp and to Moira’s side. “I know you’d stop anyone from hurting me. You moved so fast just now, when you thought--”

“Enough.” Moira stares down at her bike. Then to Winston. “Go on ahead, I’ll meet you at your house. _Go._ ”

Winston doesn’t falter. He swings into his car and takes off, back up the hills and to the road. By the time it breaches them the engine sounds like a bug, and the car is merely a little orange speck against the black grass. 

“Why won’t you take me?” Angela persists, glaring up beneath her fringe. “Are you trying to protect me from something?” 

Moira laughs, an incredulous burst from her throat, and pushes her hair back off her face. “Actually, Angela, I am.”

“You think I don’t know what’s in your case, Moira? You think I don’t know what you’ve done. I knew even before you told me.”

Angela rolls forwards and reaches into the sidecar, only to pop the locks on the case. Moira lets her. Moira lets her open it, and show her the five glass bottles swirling with black blood strapped inside. Her chest aches. “And I know you’ve been keeping something from me. I know you’re scared.”

Moira whispers, wet eyes fixed to the vials, “You should be the one who’s scared.” 

“If you wanted more blood you would have let me die, the moment you pulled me from the rocks. You would have farmed my body like you did the others. You would have drained me while I slept.” 

“Stop!” Moira gasps, and turns away. “Stop it, would you?” 

“Then would you?” Angela begs, and she takes Moira’s hands. “Your pain burns me before I even get close to you.” Moira can feel her rubbing her hands up her wrists, her fingers caressing her right arm, up and up and up to the elbow, where the monster stops and she becomes human once more. “Let me heal you.

“Let me come into town. Let me heal this woman, too.” 

“I can’t use you like that, won’t let others use you, either,” Moira whispers, finally letting the tears making her throat tight and her eyes sting spill. They sluice down her face, like gentle rain on glass. “I can’t be that selfish anymore, Angela.”

“Mercy,” the mermaid corrects, smiling up at her, her eyes the most beautiful thing Moira’s ever seen. “My name is Mercy. And I’m making the choice.”

~

The wind is harsh against her cheeks and without gloves her knuckles sting. Her thighs are sore where she’s hugging the bike, and the longer they ride the more her back tightens, her bones going stiff in the cold. Moira’s hair is damp with the morning mist and as she dips around bends and sends gravel popping and flying it presses against her cheeks, freezing them through. But against her back is a warmth, and around her waist are two arms crossed tightly, holding her close. 

Mercy’s tail lolls over the side behind her, resting in the sidecar where her wheelchair is folded. Her face is digging into the space between Moira’s shoulder blades, but Moira doesn’t mind. She can make out her forehead and her delicate nose, a brow. Her long hair is tucked under a beanie, and when Moira catches sight of her in the small, circular mirror stalking off the handles her heart does funny things and her breath stings. She looks childlike and small, and nothing like what Moira now knows her to be. She looks back to the road. Beneath them the engine rattles and spits, too loud for them to talk. Better that way, Moira thinks.

Mountains turn the horizon from a straight stretch to cragged and shifting, and they’re tinged with the orange of the creeping morning. It’ll only get colder once the sun as fully climbed from them, and with that thought and a pursed mouth Moira twists her wrist on the ignition, bounces with the kickback as the bike carries them faster to the town. Mercy’s arms squeeze her impossibly tight.

That’s why it’s hard to breathe, Moira tells herself, forcing her mind to keep clear, to not peek into the thoughts swirling at the back of her skull. 

Mercy presses her cheek to the leather of her coat.

Moira’s fingers twitch on the handlebar.

She bites the inside of her cheek so hard it hurts.

God, she’s gone. Even if she doesn’t want to say it. 

They aren’t far from the town now and that serves as some kind of solace. That’s what Moira thinks of as she comes down the hill, and speeds through the forest at the base, and comes out the other side. They couldn’t be more than a half hour away, and Moira’s made it this far. She’s made it two months, really, without doing something stupid. 

But wasn’t this the foolish thing she did to start it all? 

Somewhere between Moira berating herself and Mercy’s fast breaths they pass the milestone telling them they’ve made it and Moira slows, ducking off behind a cluster of shrubs and brambles. Mercy extracts herself, clumsy and stiff as though she forgot they were two separate people, wrapping her arms around herself as Moira swings her leg over the bike and stalks around to the sidecar.

“I can balance the chair on me as we make it to town,” she says, voice croaky, the first thing she’s said since they left the house. “I’ll help you into here.”

Mercy only nods, and she slides from the back of the seat into the sidecar, and with some manoeuvring they fold her long tail inside and pad it with blankets. Moira’s fingers brush the scar, faded to a gentle, blushing line across her belly, and their eyes meet. Wordlessly, Mercy hides the case of blood under the blankets, and pulls her beanie low over her white hair, tucking away the wisps that escaped in the trip. She keeps the bag of clothes on her lap, in her arms, and a silly part of Moira wonders if it’s some kind of pacifier.

“We’ll go to Winston’s house first, and he’ll touch base with Fareeha to see how she’ll want to move forward.”

Mercy nods, and looks out at the road, ready. But she seems almost sad.

And seeing that makes Moira’s chest swollen and tight, and she wants to reach down and hold her cheeks and change it. Instead Moira only rubs her brow. She doesn’t want to think about it anymore, so she kicks the bike to life. 

As they putt along, the dirt and rocks and gravel beneath the tyres turns to cobblestone, and before long the stone turns to brick. Moira keeps the engine low and her eyes keen for anyone out this early, but no one intercedes them, and taking the alleys and backways Moira brings them to Winston’s house, where the lights are off, though Moira knows better. She leaves Mercy in the bike as she raps her knuckles on the glass in the window, her back to the door, and slides her glasses back over eyes.

The first thing Winston does is sigh, and then he offers her a weak, thankful little smile. Together they transfer Mercy to the chair, eyes watchful, and Moira tilts it up the little front step and guides it down the narrow hallway.

The fire is popping and snapping in the hearth, and it paints the living room orange and makes the all the photos on the walls glow. It makes Fareeha’s black hair glisten and shine, cuts through her eyes when she stands from her spot on the couch and turns to them.

Her black eyes snap to Mercy. Her calves hit the coffee table when she steps back.

“Moira,” she manages to somehow say her name with malice and relief, “what’s- who’s this?”

“I should have warned you,” Winston starts, his hands held up, and he circles the couch to stand by Fareeha. “But I didn’t know she was coming. She’s Moira’s friend. I think she’s here to help.”

But Fareeha doesn’t seem convinced, and her gaze flicks from Mercy to Moira, distrusting and narrowed. “Is Moira back to her old tricks? Because if her name gets dredged up and linked to the store I’m not sacrificing our identities in this town-”

“You’re alright,” Moira spits beneath her breath, but loud enough to hear, and while she can handle the glares and scorn Mercy doesn’t deserve it. Moira pulls the throw blanket from the back of the chair and tucks it over Mercy’s tail. They meet eyes, Moira stooped over her, and by accident she lets her fingers linger for longer than she should. “We came here to help your mother,” she says, and when she stands upright she doesn’t move from in front of the chair. “We didn’t ride here in the bleeding witching hour so you could tell me a detailed history of my cumulative wrong-doings.”

She gets a disparaging look from Winston for her trouble, but Fareeha doesn’t contest her, so Moira takes the win and clenches her fist at her thigh.

Fareeha rubs her brow and sighs. “Can I ask what you're going to do with the mermaid, at least?”

Mercy makes a soft noise, as though she’s going to clear her throat and speak, but Moira shakes her head before she can say a word. “I can’t tell you. You’ll have to understand.” 

“And let you do whatever you please to my mother?”

Moira’s lip tugs downward. “You seem to have forgotten I’m a doctor first and foremost. I can’t tell you how Angela will help, because I believe that mermaids have already suffered enough at the hands of humans. Don’t you?”

Fareeha laughs incredulously. “So you named it?”

“Please!” Winston rubs his temples, pushing his glasses back over his forehead and pinching the bridge of his nose. “Will you two stop? _Please._ Your mother is dying, Fareeha, and Moira is the only person who is willing to try to help. I trust her. And even if blindly, I trust Angela. Let that be enough.”

Moira’s heard him yell the collective amount of twice, both accounts occurring in one night, but that doesn’t make it any less jarring. She feels like a child, but the indignation quickly leaves her when she turns her back and looks down at Mercy. She’s craning her neck and looking up at Moira with her bottom lip between sharp teeth and her eyes clear, wide with surprise. Moira scratches her nose, before taking the handles and wheeling Mercy around.  
  
“Shall we go now, or wait til more townsfolk are awake to see us?” she asks from the hallway, staring down the door.  

“Fareeha and I will go on ahead,” Winston says quickly, before the fighting can start up once more, and Moira pulls the chair back to let him shimmy round it. “We’ll meet you, same place, say half an hour?”

He straightens the collar on his coat before he twists his wrist on the brass doorknob and pulls it inwards, shuffling out into the dawn. The fog from the forest and the hills is slowly creeping across the town and turning the sleepy sun grey. When Fareeha passes them she doesn’t look back, but Mercy reaches out all the same, and catches her hand to squeeze it.

Fareeha still doesn’t look back. But she stills, and her head tilts forward, so her hair curtains her face to hide it.

 She lets her hand fall limpid at her side when Mercy releases it. Then she’s off with Winston, out in the street, and the door shuts with a muted click. 

“Come on,” Moira husks, after they stay there silent for a beat too long. “I’ll make us food. Then we’ll go.”

But Mercy snaps back from wherever her mind has drifted, and quickly she asks, “do you want to talk?”

She hasn’t spoken since they left the house. “What about?” 

She wrings her hands. “Are you mad with me?” 

“Never,” Moira says without thinking.

“Not that I kept the truth from you?” 

The blackened part of Moira that takes up residence in the left side of her heart and in all the scarring on her right hand snickers. Of course she wouldn’t say her true name. Of course she wouldn’t reveal the extent of her abilities.

You’d use them.

But the softness in her lungs and her eyes knows that that isn’t the reason.

“No one should ever make you feel like you can’t have your own secrets. That’s your right.”

“But I don’t want you to think it’s because I don’t trust you.”

She’s so different from the mermaid from almost two months ago, snarling and coiled and bound in a chair. This is the creature crowded on the floor, crying into the sheets, weak and broken and alone.

Moira’s lip tugs upwards. She crouches by her side, and reaches forward to lift the beanie out of Angela’s hair. It falls in shiny curls and tangles, static fly-aways glowing like a halo around her head. With gentle, burnt fingers she moves the tresses from Angela’s eyes, tucks them behind her finned ear. 

“People are wicked, I told you that once.”  
  
Mercy reaches up, to keep her there. Moira’s skin tingles.

“And I came to learn that there are some who are exempt from that rule.”

~

The fog isn’t unusual for this time in the morning, and aside from the old, wrought-iron lamp posts flickering off as they pass, one by one by one, the town is still and sleeping. The chair’s squeaks are quiet things, and smaller than their breaths, which puff as icy little clouds in front of their chapped lips. The air is sharp, but Moira’s lungs are warm, and as she pushes Mercy up the sidewalk and turns off into the main street she doesn’t feel the precursory anxiety crawling up her throat like oil, or the antsy trepidation flaying her nerves.

She feels numb, but in a good way.

Contentment, a little voice whispers, soft and gentle and smiling. 

The deeper they walk the more lights fill the frosty windows, and the fog is replaced with smoke chuffing from chimneys. A girl throws bound newspapers from her bicycle to doorsteps. The bakery’s doors are shut against the cold but the sign is turned to _open,_ and Moira looks down when she feels Mercy slump back.  

She’s breathing deeply, and her eyes are shut, and she's facing the sun and she’s smiling.

Moira’s grip clenches around the chair’s handles. All she wants to do is lean down and pull her hair over her shoulder, and trace her fingers against the closed slits in her neck.

Moira thinks she wouldn’t like anything more than this.

She doesn’t need anything more than this.

Her lungs are warm. The hole in her chest feels a little less heavy, a little more bearable. 

Moira looks up, and tells herself that there isn’t a rush. Not anymore.

And soon the birds begin to cry to each other and signal the morning, and soon drowsy men are falling out their front door to stumble down to the fisheries and docks, and after that the women, fixing bonnets and skirts and scarves, all trickle into the main street and up to the markets, and begin their bargaining.

And soon they cross the blue star in the stone in the town square, and Moira closes her eyes and promises she’ll show it to Mercy later, that there’s time for that, and for everything else. 

Everything else.

Mercy folds her hands over the blanket covering her tail, tucked in at the sides and pinned to the foot-rests. Her curled ends of her hair brushes against the delicate underside of her wrists, so pale the skin is almost translucent.

And soon, Moira turns them into the little alleyway, and the tyres send pebbles and rocks skittering, and Moira stalls a second, looking down at Mercy, her hand poised by the door.

“Go on,” she says, or maybe that’s just Moira’s mind, because her voice sounds ethereal and quiet and like the ocean crashing against the shore all at once.

And the rap of Moira’s knuckles sounds like bullets, just like they do every time.

But when Fareeha opens the door she isn’t glaring like every other time. Her eyes are red and bloody, and the shirt she’s wearing is open at the front and messily stuffed into her britches. She helps Moira lift the chair up the front step and into the entryway, where Moira shucks the blanket and leaves it on the stand by the door. They’re the only sounds in the house, aside from whispers and snuffles from the storefront.

“Don’t worry,” Fareeha murmurs. “They won’t come back here. I asked them not to.”

“Your family?” Mercy questions. Fareeha nods, and doesn’t resist this time when her hand finds itself in Mercy’s webbed grip.

If Fareeha is feeling even a microbe of the peace Moira suffers whenever she’s in Mercy’s presence she hopes it does her some good. But that doesn’t mean Moira’s teeth don’t quietly clench as she watches them, and she doesn’t look away when it gets too much. It’s funny, what two months of a person’s company can do to someone. 

Moira clears her throat. “We should be quick.”

“Of course,” Fareeha says, eyes wide and fixed to Mercy.

Her scar is faint now. Moira remembers when it hung open, too deep to come back from alone. 

She knows how it is, to feel like that. 

“Help me lift her, would you?”

Fareeha does, and together they get Mercy into Moira’s arms, and Moira holds her close as they wind up the spiralling stars, her medical kit and briefcase forgotten at Winston's terrace. 

Mercy loops her arms round her neck and their chests are pressed together, and her breaths are gentle against Moira’s cheek. This might be the closest they’ve ever been, Moira realises, even when she carried Mercy from the rock pools.

Because Mercy wasn’t holding her back then, didn’t have her face pressed to her neck and her tail curled against her thigh.

When they reach the landing Fareeha steps ahead and she opens the middle door, already unlocked and holding Winston inside. He’s sitting by the bed with his forehead to his palm, and his other hand is stroking Ana’s thin fingers. He jolts when Fareeha clears her throat, sniffing and pulling his glasses out of his curly black hair. He smiles when he sees Mercy, though, and Moira, with her arms full of mermaid. 

“If we do this,” Moira starts, lowering Mercy onto the circle rug and keenly aware of her wonder as she takes in every little detail in the room, all the silks and all the flowers and all the trinkets on the shelves, like offerings, “I have to make a request.”

Fareeha nods. Moira hopes she’s won enough favour.

“We have to be alone here,” she says slowly.

She can sense Fareeha’s objection before she hears it, but Winston stands up, and he nods solemnly. “You don’t have to explain. If you can cure her, and all you need is privacy, that’s a small price to ask.” 

Fareeha still looks like her mouth is full of rebuttals but eventually she deflates, and with a pained look at her mother she nods, and lets Winston herd her from the room. He gives Moira a look before he closes the door though, long and full of something she thinks she’s supposed to understand. Mercy’s tail curls and flicks rhythmically in front her though and it’s distracting. And so Winston gives up, and the door shuts with a gentle click. 

“If you do this, they’ll know it was you. That you have _something._ They know I don’t have any of my equipment.” Despite the tinniness to Moira’s voice Mercy still smiles, and her tail still ripples, and she peels Ana’s blankets back just to her chest. Ana’s silver hair is plaited to her side and Mercy coils it up over her head on the pillow, out of the way. “I trust Winston. I trust Fareeha on principle. But I don’t trust their selfishness or humanity.”

“I think you taught people a lesson, Moira,” Mercy says, adrift. “I think when the Citadel crumbled and when Gabriel’s soul was spliced with a ghost by your hand, people learnt humility. Learnt how hot hubris could burn. At least you did.

“And you’ll protect me,” she says, and she unbuttons the front of Ana’s shirt. “You’ll never let anyone hurt me. Just like I won’t let you hurt yourself.”

And Moira watches, silently, as the sun hits the window and the purple and the red silk, and the sprigs of lavender on the mantle above the empty hearth catch her eye. She watches as Mercy parts Ana’s shirt and she watches as her white hands settle over her paper-thin heartbeat. 

She watches as Mercy smiles.

As she takes one final look back over her shoulder, up at her, before she shuts her eyes and sighs on a smile. 

~*~

There’s a sweets shop, she remembers, tucked away somewhere along the shopping boulevard. Small with mahogany doors and nice timber floors and liquorice that almost holds a candle to that of the shop in her hometown. She passes the tailors, and she passes the cobbler, and when she swears and backtracks Mercy laughs.

“You should ask someone,” she says, and her hair swishes in its ponytail when she looks back and up at Moira. “It’ll be quicker.”

Moira mutters to herself in her mothertongue, clicking her teeth and frightening children when she stalks back around the corner and peers over her glasses at the shop fronts. Despite the winter-touched air turning her ears pink the sun is warm on the back of her neck, and seeps in through her coat and gloves.

It makes Mercy’s hair shine. She looks like sparks from a fire as she shakes her head and sighs, tiredly. “I’m going to ask someone.”

“Hah! No need.” With a new surge of gusto Moira makes a beeline for a little shop with large windows and a warm wooden door. Sandwiched between a humble bookshop and a lively bistro Moira eyes the width of the door, and peers into the shop itself, a dejected twist to her mouth when she spies the lack of floorspace. “Well. That’s a let down.”

“I can wait out here?”

“You might have to, I’m afraid.” 

A little bell above the door signals her entrance, but Moira fears she’s the only one to hear it over the laughing and chattering and tinny record player spinning lazily in the corner. The shop is a barrage of pinks and whites and reds, like something taken straight from a child’s daydream and Moira’s worst nightmare. It’s nothing like what she remembers, when Winston first gave her a tour of the town. She slumps.

But endeavours all the same, when she glances back out at Mercy waiting for her. She made a promise.

School must be off today, because the children have flocked to the store and they fill it to almost max capacity, their fists stuffed with candy bars and their purses of loose change jingling against the counter and spilling to the floor. Moira feels like a giant, even amongst the shelves, which barely reach her sternum. When she glances over at the young woman with long brown hair and standing at perhaps a generous half of Moira’s size manning the register, she understands why.

There’s another girl in front of her, leaning over the paying side of the counter and clearly flirting, though to the side as to allow the sugar-powered cherubs to purchase their vice. Moira sniffs.

She was never a fan of candy as a child, sugar only giving her headaches and chocolate too rare in her hometown to enjoy without her mother ordering her to. But she plucks a small box of chocolates that rattle in her grip from the shelf, as well as frosted strawberries, picturing the pink against Mercy’s lips.

Moira swallows. She swipes a twine-tied bag of liquorice, and stalks to the counter like a dark cloud come to rain on everything.

The woman manning the counter stares at her, eyes going wide and lip getting caught between teeth. _That_ garners the attention of the other woman, who’s amber eyes narrow and muscled arms cross, an oddly familiar tattoo penned on her bicep.  

Moira offers up a handful of quarts before either can say anything.

“That was intense,” she tells Mercy afterwards, stumbling out into the street and shaking her head. “It’s completely changed since the last time I visited.”

Mercy points to a brass, scripted plaque reads _under new management,_ then to the shop’s sign. " _Bunny & Cat_. I don’t get it.” 

“Let’s just hope the treats are still as good,” Moira grumbles, dropping the brown paper bag on Mercy’s blanketed lap. 

It’s past lunch but not late enough in the day for the sun to begin to sink, and Moira pushes them along the bustling streets and past the docks where the men yell and the ocean calls, and they break into the open courtyard in front of the town hall. Adjacent is Fareeha’s store, and through the glass of the display window Moira can see her smiling, serving a customer and wrapping the silk for him.

The hole in her chest is little more than a scar, thin and white and faded.

“Here,” Moira says, wheeling them across and to one of the empty blue seats in front of the town hall. They’re on the eastern side of the star. Moira sits and stretches her legs, her boots lining with the triangular points painted in the stone. “I think this is my favourite place in the entire world.”

“Not even your hometown?”

Moira closes her eyes and breathes, follows the rivers and the swollen mountains and the tiny villages, not unlike this. She used to explore the forests as a child. Til she was an adult, she’d never seen the sea. “Except for my hometown.”

“Could we see it one day?” 

Moira laughs. “Yes, when I see your coves and caves and coral beds.” She reaches over to Mercy’s lap and opens the bag, unwrapping the liquorice and offering her a black, leathery strip. “For now we have this. It’s enough.”

Trusting and without hesitation Mercy pops the entire piece into her mouth, and Moira nearly starts when she moans softly and chews. She watches incredulously as she swallows it, and opens her eyes to look at Moira, and reaches back for the bag.

“I thought you’d hate it,” Moira whispers, mostly to herself. 

“There is a lot you have to learn,” Mercy tells her seriously, plucking the bag from her hands and settling back in her chair, looking like a pigeon with its feathers fluffed in her white cashmere sweater and red silk scarf.

Moira acqueises her licorice. She leans back in the chair, on the very edge, so as to be as close to Mercy as she can be where she’s parked. 

It’s been six days since they rode out here before the sun had woken. Six days of town trips and rides through the countryside and sleep-ins and the warm, happy fire in Winston's terrace house. Six more days that Ana Amari has been alive.

She isn’t out of bed just yet, but she’s conscious, and able to hold a conversation. Moira wasn’t surprised, exactly, but she was still shocked. It was as though Mercy had brought a ghost back to life.

Fareeha had even hugged her, and cried against her coat and into her neck. She never asked a question.

She didn’t need to, Moira supposes now, watching the town and its ever-shifting people. Beside her Mercy sighs, and sinks into her chair.

“I like this town,” she decides. “We should live here. Nobody stares to long. The food is good. Or at least, good for human food.”

“Did you ever think you’d be topside like this?”

“I never thought my life would ever lead me here, to be like this,” Mercy admits.

“But it’s good, yes?”

“Better than,” Mercy says softly, the bag crinkling in her grip.

Moira hums. “I used to come here after I visited Ana, and the other patients, if I had the time. I felt like I belonged in the town, if that makes sense. As though I could come here and sit and no one would question me. No one would swear at me, call me filthy things. I could just sit. Look down at the star.

“I never thought I’d share it with someone,” she continues, pilfering the liquorice for a piece of her own.  
  
She's thankful she checked her traps that grey, foggy day. She's thankful that she did it just in time. But perhaps maybe it was some kind of fate, and one way or another the water would always give her her penance. 

One way or another, whether she would be the first or the last mermaid Moira took, Mercy would have always made it to her.   
  
Their fingers knot tightly, between the arm of the chair and the edge of the bench.  
  
And Mercy smiles up at her. Then out at the humans, milling about unwitting and unknowing, paying neither of them a second of their minds. Just the way they like it.

 

* * *

 


End file.
